Bong Joon-ho Called Her a ‘Diamond Mine.’ Now Jo Yeo-jeong Holds Lee Chang-dong’s Camera in Netflix’s Possible Love

Featured photo: Jo Yeo-jeong in October 2024. Photo: TV10 via YouTube / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.

Jo Yeo-jeong’s charm is the way she holds a cool, hidden interior inside a sunny face. Director Bong Joon-ho, who cast her as the wealthy wife Yeon-kyo in Parasite, compared her to “a tremendously deep diamond mine” and said “being able to mine even part of it would be meaningful” (Sports Donga). Seven years later, Lee Chang-dong said of her role as documentary director Ye-ji in his Netflix film Possible Love: “Jo Yeo-jeong was an actor who understood it with her body” (iMBC Entertainment).

I’ll be honest: setting those words from two of Korean cinema’s masters side by side, I couldn’t help feeling proud as a fan. Starting November 6, the whole world meets that Ye-ji on Netflix.

November 6, 2026: Ye-ji in Possible Love

Possible Love follows laid-off factory worker Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu) and his wife Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon), who meet documentary director Ye-ji (Jo Yeo-jeong) and her husband Sang-woo (Zo In-sung) when Ye-ji wants to film their story, and the two couples come face to face with each other’s very different lives and hidden desires. Ye-ji is the one who meets Ho-seok and Mi-ok at a funeral home and asks them to appear in her documentary (Kwangju Ilbo). The film won the Grand Jury Prize (Silver Lion) at the Venice International Film Festival in September.

• The one holding the camera. Lee Chang-dong describes the film as “a story about the gaze.” “Picking up a camera means looking,” he said, and the person who picks it up is Ye-ji (TV Daily).
• “Not a role you can do by analyzing it in your head.” His full quote: “Ye-ji isn’t a role you can play by analyzing her in your head and thinking, ‘She must be this kind of character.’ You have to understand her with your body, and Jo Yeo-jeong was an actor who understood that” (iMBC Entertainment).
• A film she watched five times. At the Busan International Film Festival, Jo marveled at Jeon Do-yeon: “I watched the film five times, and in the scene where I interview Mi-ok (…) she’s a fellow actor, but she didn’t even feel like an actor.” After the Venice screening, she cried, and Zo In-sung, sitting next to her, laughed: “I looked left so I wouldn’t cry, and Yeo-jeong was crying, so I was in trouble” (TV Daily).
• Blue Dragon calls again. On October 28, she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the Blue Dragon Film Awards. She won Best Actress at the same awards in 2019 for Parasite, and now she’s been called back as a supporting nominee; the ceremony is November 25 (Good Morning Economy, Wikipedia).

Where to watch: Netflix film Possible Love, premiering worldwide Friday, November 6, 2026 — Netflix (US and Korea, checked October 31, 2026). More on the film: Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love, Zo In-sung, Jeon Do-yeon.

Filmography: from cover model to the masters’ actress

• 1997, a cover at sixteen. She first became known as a cover model for the magazine CeCi and began acting in 1999. A long stretch of small roles followed, and she stuck it out (Wikipedia).
• 2011, I Need Romance. As Seonwoo In-young in the tvN drama, she fixed herself in viewers’ minds as a romantic-comedy lead.

• 2019, Parasite’s Yeon-kyo. As the naive yet vain wealthy wife, she stood on the Academy Awards stage when the film won Best Picture, and the cast won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast. She won Best Actress at the Blue Dragon Film Awards for the role (Wikipedia).

• 2019, Woman of 9.9 Billion. She played Jeong Seo-yeon, a woman who stumbles onto a fortune in cash, and won the top excellence award for an actress at the KBS Drama Awards (Topstar News).

• 2024–2025, two faces on the big screen. She played Su-yeon, the vanished fiancée, in the thriller Hidden Face (1.01 million admissions), and Shin Yeon-hwa in My Daughter Is a Zombie, the top-grossing Korean film of 2025 (Topstar News, Topstar News).

A year later came the zombie comedy that topped Korea’s box office.

Where to watch her earlier work: streaming for Parasite, Hidden Face and My Daughter Is a Zombie varies by country, so check JustWatch for your region.

After Bong Joon-ho and Lee Chang-dong, her next master is already set. Jo Yeo-jeong has joined Squid Game director Hwang Dong-hyuk’s new film KO Club, alongside Lee Byung-hun, Oh Jung-se, Park Hae-soo and Kim So-jin (Joy News 24). I’ll follow Ye-ji’s camera on November 6, hope to hear her name called again at Blue Dragon on November 25, and wait, heart racing, for news from the third master’s set.

Sources

• Sports Donga: Bong Joon-ho on Jo Yeo-jeong
• iMBC Entertainment: Lee Chang-dong on Ye-ji
• TV Daily: BIFF press conference, Kwangju Ilbo: Possible Love synopsis
• Good Morning Economy: Blue Dragon nominations, Wikipedia: Jo Yeo-jeong
• Topstar News: KBS Drama Awards, Topstar News: Hidden Face, Topstar News: My Daughter Is a Zombie
• Joy News 24: KO Club casting