Youn Yuh-jung plays old women who have stopped being polite, and she plays them without a wink. After more than fifty years of work, she is the person the rest of the cast has to work around, and in Pachinko that is exactly where she is best.
Fi1m perspective
In Pachinko (2022) the older Sunja has decided what she thinks about almost everything and says it. Her grandson Solomon, a Tokyo banker with a deal to close, spends the 1989 scenes trying to manage her, and Youn Yuh-jung plays the failure of that project as the point of every scene they share. She does not raise her voice and she does not soften a line to make it kinder. She has outlived the need to. That is the part she is now known for, the older woman who has given up on tact, and it is the part she plays best.
She did not start there. She went into Korean television in 1967 after an audition took her out of Hanyang University, and Kim Ki-young's Woman of Fire (1971) made her a star as Myeong-ja, a femme fatale, which is about as far from Sunja as a career can travel. Then she stopped. Marriage and a move to America took her out of acting in the mid-1970s, and when she came back to Korea in 1984 it was to smaller roles and a long climb. The acclaim at home arrived in the 2000s, some of it in her work with Im Sang-soo, including The Housemaid (2010), and the wider world caught up with Lee Isaac Chung's Minari (2020), in which she plays the grandmother, Soon-ja. We have not reviewed those and will not weigh them here. By the time she was being cast as old women, she had been an actor for more than forty years.
We laughed more in the 1989 strand of Pachinko than in the rest of the series, which is odd, because the 1989 strand is the weaker one, and nearly all of it was her. Jin Ha's Solomon has been written as a lesson rather than a person, and she has to play against that, so the comedy comes entirely from her side: she says what she thinks the moment she thinks it and leaves him to cope. Kim Min-ha, who plays the young Sunja with her chin up and her mouth shut, has the more demanding job. Youn has the better lines, and she knows what to do with them.
Her notices are close to uniformly good, and the nearest thing to a reservation anyone has put in print concerns English-language dialogue, which she has approached with some reluctance; BEEF (2026), where she plays Chairwoman Park, is the case usually cited. That is a small thing. The larger risk is the one that comes with being very good at one kind of part: that the blunt grandmother becomes the only thing she is offered. She said in 2021, "I like adventure. I'm either very brave or very ignorant."
The woman who played Myeong-ja in 1971 has not gone anywhere. Start with Pachinko, where she is the best reason to stay for the present-day scenes, and hope that somebody soon writes her a part with something to hide.
Biography
Youn Yuh-jung (Korean: 윤여정) is a South Korean actress. She began her career in television in the late 1960s after dropping out of Hanyang University following an audition. She rose to prominence with her role in the 1971 film Woman of Fire.
She retired from acting in the mid-1970s after marrying and moving to the United States, but returned to Korea in the mid-1980s following her divorce. She is known for matriarchal roles in Korean films and television, including The Housemaid (2010) and several dramas.
Youn gained international recognition for her performance in Minari (2020), for which she became the first Korean actor to win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She later appeared as Older Sunja in the series Pachinko (2022) and as Chairwoman Park in BEEF (2023).
