Suzy Carries Three Films at Once and Still Trusts Her Gut Over Any Formula

Suzy has never been short on compliments about her face, but for a long time she genuinely did not understand one of the most common ones. In her Elle Korea October 2026 shoot and interview, the actor said that the label 'first love' used to confuse her completely.

"I couldn't understand why people saw their first love when they looked at me," she told the magazine. Then someone pointed out that her features were ordinary and unassuming enough that viewers could project the emotions of a film onto them. "That's when I thought, oh, I can hold many different characters in this face."

It's a disarmingly honest way to talk about one of her clearest professional assets. Since her breakout role as Yang Seo-yeon in the 2012 film Architecture 101, Suzy has built a filmography that keeps circling back to that exact quality: characters who feel emotionally accessible, even when their situations are anything but. She followed that with the morally complex Yi Yu-mi in Anna, the quietly restless Lee Doo-na in Doona!, and the steely Ki Ga-young in When the Stars Gossip.

A method built on backstory

For the Elle interview, Suzy walked through how her approach to character has shifted as she has worked. Early in her career, she focused on the character itself, their lines, their actions on the page. Now she thinks more about the web around a character: the relationships, the environment, the years before the story starts.

"Even if it doesn't appear in the script, I imagine the time this person has passed through," she explained. "I create my own reasons and backstory for them."

She also described something that clearly gives her real pleasure: the surprise of discovering an expression she didn't know she had. "As time passes, I sometimes find a facial expression or a side of myself I didn't know existed. That makes me genuinely happy, the feeling that there are still faces inside me I haven't met yet."

'All the rooms are closed except one'

Suzy reached for an image to describe how she holds onto, and lets go of, the characters she has played. She thinks of them as rooms inside her, each one home to a different role.

"There's always been a feeling of love and regret for every character I've played," she said. "But I'm someone who lives in the present, so I think I've closed all those rooms carefully. Right now only the Harem's Men room is wide open."

Harem's Men is the project currently in production, and it sounds like it has her full attention. Two more films are waiting in the wings: Seven O'Clock Breakfast Club for the Brokenhearted, a story about strangers sharing their grief that she says drew her in because "you can be more honest with someone who carries the same sorrow"; and Hyeonhok, directed by Han Jae-rim, which she described as a project with a mysterious atmosphere and a woman's story embedded inside it.

"Playing Song Jeong-hwa was genuinely difficult," she said of the Hyeonhok shoot, "but as difficult as it was, it was just as enjoyable. I learned a lot."

For the shoot itself, Suzy wore pieces from the Celine 2026 winter collection, the editorial captured across a series of images that lean into the same understated quality she described in conversation.

Ask her how she picks her next project and she gives an answer that fits: "Honestly, I still don't fully know my own criteria. I want to play the characters and stories my heart moves toward at that moment. In the end, I think I trust the next pull a lot."