The Queen of Cannes on a Ballot With Julianne Moore: Jeon Do-yeon in Netflix’s Possible Love

Featured photo: Jeon Do-yeon in Seoul, August 2026. Photo: Republic of Korea (KOREA.NET) / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Jeon Do-yeon’s gift is a face that brings to the surface the feelings any other actor would hide. That face won her Best Actress at Cannes in 2007, the first for a Korean actor, and 19 years later, in Possible Love from the same director, Lee Chang-dong, it put her on the nominee list for Outstanding Lead Performance at the Gotham Awards in New York. In a category that picks ten performers with no split by gender, the names standing beside hers are Julianne Moore, Ian McKellen, Mahershala Ali and Gillian Anderson (The Gotham).

I’ll be honest: when I found Jeon Do-yeon’s name among those ten, my heart swelled as a fan. Starting November 6, the whole world gets to watch that performance together on Netflix.

November 6, 2026: Mi-ok in Possible Love

Possible Love follows two couples: Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu), a laid-off worker, and his wife Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon), and Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong) and Sang-woo (Zo In-sung), a pair of documentary filmmakers who set out to film them. Through the making of that documentary, they come face to face with each other’s very different lives and hidden desires. In September, it won the Grand Jury Prize (Silver Lion) at the Venice Film Festival, a first for a Korean film (Hankook Ilbo).

• A wife holding a time bomb. Jeon describes Mi-ok as “someone who lives holding a time bomb to her chest”: a woman “always on edge, never at ease, because she doesn’t know when her husband’s wounds will explode, yet who never gives up on him” (iMBC Entertainment).
• A month of honors. Best Actress at the Korean Association of Film Critics Awards on October 20 (YTN), a Best Actress nomination at the Blue Dragon Film Awards on October 28 (Good Morning Economy), and the Gotham nomination, announced in New York on October 27, which landed in Korea the same day as the Blue Dragon news (The Gotham). The Gotham ceremony is November 30 at Cipriani Wall Street in New York; the Blue Dragon Awards are November 25 in Seoul.
• And now, Oscar talk. The Hollywood Reporter wrote that she could become the first Korean actor nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress, and Rotten Tomatoes’ editors put her name among their five predicted nominees (Harper’s Bazaar Korea). In the same Hollywood Reporter interview, Lee Byung-hun said, in effect, that he finds it puzzling the world is only now discovering her (TV Report).

Where to watch: Possible Love premieres worldwide on Netflix on Friday, November 6, 2026 (US and Korea, checked October 29, 2026).

Filmography: from The Contact to Mi-ok

• 1997, her film debut. After five years of holding her ground in TV dramas, she became a star overnight with her first film, The Contact, opposite Han Suk-kyu, and won Best New Actress at both the Blue Dragon and Grand Bell Awards (Wikipedia).
• 1999, Happy End. Playing a wife who falls into an affair with a former lover, she sealed her nickname: “the chameleon” (Wikipedia).

Two years later came a very different woman.

• 2002, Shoot for the Stars. In the SBS drama, she starred opposite Zo In-sung, who played a young man dreaming of becoming an actor. Twenty-four years later, the two meet again in Possible Love (Wikipedia).

The drama is old enough that no official trailer exists, so this scene from SBS’s official channel stands in.

• 2007, Queen of Cannes. As a mother who loses her husband and then her son in Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine, she won Best Actress at Cannes. It was the first acting prize at Cannes for any Korean (Wikipedia).
• 2010–2015, back to Cannes. She returned to the Cannes competition with The Housemaid, sat on the main competition jury in 2014, and made The Shameless with Kim Nam-gil (Wikipedia).

Three years later, a maid in a mansion.

Next, CJ ENM’s official international trailer.

• 2023–2025, meeting Netflix. The assassin in Kill Boksoon, Su-young the ex-cop who takes the fall for every crime, serves her time and comes back in Revolver, and the murder suspect in the Netflix series The Price of Confession, where she reunited with Kim Go-eun: instead of settling into the throne of “Queen of Cannes,” she kept moving into strangers’ skins (Harper’s Bazaar Korea).

And here is Netflix’s official trailer for her latest series.

Where to watch her Netflix work: Kill Boksoon and The Price of Confession stream on Netflix (checked October 29, 2026).

The face Cannes saw first, New York and Seoul are calling again in the same autumn, 19 years later. I’ll meet Mi-ok on November 6, and then, at the end of November, I’ll be waiting with my fingers crossed to hear her name called in two cities.

Sources

• The Gotham: The Gothams Announce Nominations for 36th Edition (October 27, 2026)
• Hankook Ilbo, October 28, 2026, TV Report
• iMBC Entertainment: Jeon Do-yeon on Mi-ok
• YTN: Korean Association of Film Critics Awards, Good Morning Economy: Blue Dragon Film Awards nominees
• Harper’s Bazaar Korea
• Wikipedia: Jeon Do-yeon, Wikipedia: Zo In-sung