For several years after the biggest run of her career, Moon Choi, known in Korea as Choi Hee-seo, kept her trophies out of sight.
The haul was substantial. Her turn as Japanese anarchist Kaneko Fumiko in “Anarchist from Colony” swept Korea’s new actress prizes, and her lead role in independent feature “Our Body,” which bowed in Toronto, earned her Busan International Film Festival’s Actress of the Year honor in 2018. By her own count, two films brought her 14 awards in a single year. She was around 30.
“Some years passed, and I put the trophies in the cabinet. I didn’t want to have them displayed because whenever I saw them displayed somewhere, I kind of felt pressure,” Choi tells Variety. “I felt like I had to prove something to show them that I was worth it.”
“I felt that being successful at a young age can do some bad things to you. It didn’t make me feel proud, but it actually kind of made me feel crestfallen because I felt like I had to reach a height that goes beyond those awards,” she says.
What followed was a stretch she describes candidly: more independent films, Korean TV series that “flopped really badly” and film “A Girl with Closed Eyes” with Kim Minha that still has no release date two years after its Busan premiere. Through all of it, she was waiting for “Bedford Park.”
Choi is now back in Busan in a different role, sitting on the seven-member jury for the festival’s competition section, which is only in its second year. Zhang Yimou presides over a panel that also includes Bi Gan, Kei Ishikawa, July Jung, Vietnamese producer Tran Thi Bich Ngoc and Kazakh actor Samal Yeslyamova. “Bedford Park” is also in town, screening in the Flash Forward section.
“I don’t have the pressure that I need to prove anything to anybody,” Choi says of returning as a juror. “I’m kind of feeling like a student trying to learn from all these films that I’m going to be watching alongside amazing people like Zhang Yimou and Bi Gan.”
Her yardstick for the competition comes from Asghar Farhadi’s idea that a good film begins once the audience leaves the cinema. Two days before heading to Busan, she watched Lee Chang-dong’s “Possible Love,” starring her friend and stage partner Jeon Do-yeon, on the big screen with her father. Outside the theater, the pair argued over whether the film’s final shot of a full moon offers hope. Her father read the title as a paradox pointing to an impossible love; she saw the opposite.
“I just felt so fulfilled because of those conversations I had with my father, which is rare,” Choi says. “I want to look for the films that leave us with these amazing questions as we exit the theater, rather than the films that I feel like that give us definitive answers.”
As an actor, she adds, she will be watching for performances that linger “not because they were so perfect, but because they were so truthful in the moment.”
Written and directed by Stephanie Ahn, “Bedford Park” follows Audrey (Choi), a Korean American physical therapist in New Jersey caught between her immigrant parents’ expectations and her own life. After her mother is hurt in a car accident, Audrey forms an unlikely bond with Eli (Son Suk-ku), the former wrestler who was behind the wheel. The film world premiered in Sundance’s U.S. Dramatic competition in January and won the Special Jury Award for Debut Feature. Sony Pictures Classics picked up worldwide rights during the festival, and the film has since played Toronto’s Discovery program.
Choi auditioned seven years ago. Ahn sent her the full screenplay in advance, which she says is rare, and she finished it on her phone in one sitting. Audrey’s tug-of-war between being a dutiful Korean daughter and living for herself mirrored her own upbringing: Japan from the ages of nine to 12, two years in Seoul, then three in New Jersey. Back in Korea, classmates teased her as “the Japanese kid.”
“It seemed like wherever I went, I didn’t belong anywhere because when I came back to Seoul from Japan or the U.S., people would view me as that girl from Japan, that girl from the U.S.,” Choi says. “Although I’m not a Korean American immigrant, I thought that I could resonate with that.”
Audrey’s profession gave Choi another way into the character. “I felt like she had such a warm heart for others, but she didn’t know how to do that for herself,” she says, linking that to the value Korean and Japanese families place on self-sacrifice. “I think Audrey was fighting against that.”
The film took years to finance. Choi was unknown in the U.S., Ahn was a first-time director coming from editing, and Eli was originally written as a white character, with names like Tom Hardy and Jake Gyllenhaal floated as a dream. COVID shut everything down. Four years in, the team shot a 15-minute short as a proof of concept for financiers.
Choi showed it to Son, a friend of a decade from the days when they would drop off casting resumes together. By then he had broken out as a star, and he told her he would want the role if Eli were Korean American. She pitched the idea of rewriting Eli as a Korean American adoptee to Ahn, who met Son over Zoom and reworked the script for him. Son in turn brought in Hyundai Motor Company, which backed the film as its first investment in an independent feature, and Foster and Ahn made Choi an executive producer. Foster produces alongside Russ Krasnoff, Chris S. Lee, Theresa Kang, Son and Nina Yang Bongiovi, whose earlier Sundance launches include “Sorry to Bother You” and Rebecca Hall’s “Passing.”
“They were kind enough and generous enough for me to be able to focus on acting on set,” Choi says. Post-production brought three-hour Zoom calls over cuts and music cues. “That was, I think, when I felt like, ‘Oh, this is what producing feels like.’”
Watching the finished film at Sundance, she says, felt like “giving birth to something so valuable,” a sentiment Son shared.
Choi has rarely followed the conventional path for a Korean actor. A voracious reader as a child, she kept looking for scripts that could surprise her. That didn’t always sit well with K-dramas and Korean commercial films, where with some scripts, she says, you know exactly what will happen on the next page. That choosiness earned her a reputation for “independent and artsy movies.” After New Jersey, she enrolled at Seoul’s Yonsei University to read journalism and English literature, spending her evenings training as an actor with its student theater club, and later took a year of acting courses at UC Berkeley on an exchange program. She is also the author of a collection of short stories and poems. Along the way she appeared in Bong Joon Ho’s “Okja” and shot a two-hour feature in Gangneung with Japanese actor Joe Odagiri, who she says came to Korea and worked for next to nothing.
Choi recalls a conversation with Jeon in New York, where the pair recently closed the final leg of Simon Stone’s staging of “The Cherry Orchard.” The production premiered in Seoul in 2024 with Jeon and “Squid Game” actor Park Hae-soo, then toured Hong Kong, Singapore and Adelaide before landing at New York’s Park Avenue Armory in September.
“She just held my hands, and she said, ‘Moon … I’m so happy for you, and just know that you are greater than what you think you are,’” Choi says.
Choi already has one directing credit, “Bandi,” her short for the 2021 “Unframed” anthology, in which she, Son, Park Jeong-min and Lee Je-hoon each directed a short. Choi and Son also wrote theirs. She says she never set out to direct and writes screenplays mainly for the pleasure of it.
A new project may change that. Choi has signed on to lead a Korean stage adaptation of “Une histoire d’amour,” the play by French writer-director and actor Alexis Michalik that follows a lesbian couple’s attempt to have a child. The play premiered in 2020, picked up a Molière for its staging that year, and Michalik has since made it into a film. Choi will perform it in Seoul next year, and after a Zoom call with Michalik she has his blessing to option it for a screen version she pictures in Brooklyn.
“Should I direct it, produce it? I’m not sure,” Choi says. What she does know is that she wants to write the screenplay herself, which she says “would kind of give me an idea if I want to produce it, or act in it, or direct it.”
The global reach of K-pop and series like “Squid Game” has opened doors for Korean actors abroad, Choi says, but whether they can act in English remains the limit. Choi now acts in English, Korean and Japanese, but she only started learning English at 15, and Ahn hired a dialect coach for both leads so they would sound like Korean Americans from New Jersey. “I know I can do it because I’ve done it once,” she says.
At home, she sees Korean cinema in recovery but leaning hard on genre, particularly horror, a pattern she also noticed in Los Angeles meetings. Park Chan-wook and Lee Chang-dong have delivered new films in back-to-back years, and she points to Na Hong-Jin and Byun Sung-hyun among those who followed them. But she wants more filmmakers her own age, in their late 30s or early 40s, and singles out Son, who runs his own production company and is writing his first feature.
She feels a responsibility there too, she says, “because I produce now as well, I can probably be the forefront of that, because it’s generation, right? Who do we have after Lee Chang-dong and Park Chan-wook?”
For now, Choi is on the festival circuit with “Bedford Park” and hunting for an English-language role. She signed with Gersh and management company Cognition six months ago and has been auditioning and sending self-tapes since.
“I am a total newcomer in Hollywood,” she says.
And the screen version of “Une histoire d’amour”? “I don’t know, it’s going to take 10 years, maybe.”