Hoyeon Takes Hollywood - With her first English-speaking role with an A-list director, the model and Squid Game alum is proving she's here to stay.

With her first English-speaking role with an A-list director, the model and Squid Game alum is proving she's here to stay. Her debut acting role in Squid Game made her a breakout star in 2021 for her magnetic performance as Kang Sae-byeok, a North Korean defector with an "I'm not here to make friends" iciness, who participates in the deadly competition to provide for her little brother. A year later, she won a Screen Actors Guild Award for Female Actor in a Drama Series. Now she has 18.8 million followers on Instagram and fans all over the world. (When a group of NYC teenage girls wearing baggy jeans spot her outside the Chinatown coffee shop we've moved to post-steak, they quiver and audibly freak out.)

- By Kathleen Hou - Photography by Mario Sorrentino - Styled by Nicola Formichetti

It's a big bite, but it isn't more than Hoyeon can handle. In front of the South Korean actress is a butcher's feast of raw steak on a wooden cutting board. Executive Chef David Shim of Cote Korean Steakhouse uses shiny silver tongs to place the squares of meat-precisely cut, towering, perfectly marbled-one by one on a fiery barbecue grill. As they begin to cook, Hoyeon inhales with the kind of relish that most people reserve for a rose garden.

"So juicy," she says, grinning ear to ear at the meat perfume, the steam bathing her rosy cheeks. She takes a strip of red leaf lettuce, elegantly dips the tip of her chopsticks into the spicy ssamjang, and adds daikon cubes and a piece of glossy beef on top. In one smooth motion, she opens her mouth wide to reveal picture-perfect teeth (befitting the face of a Lancôme ambassador), folds the whole thing in half and it disappears. Her eyes squeeze shut.

Her face tips to the sky. She wiggles and shimmies back and forth on the wooden bench, bopping for a full minute in response to the dopamine hit. "Mmm!" Beyond the meat bliss, Hoyeon has been feeling giddy about life in general these days. She continues to be a modeling force, with her finely symmetrical face appearing in magazines, ad campaigns, and the occasional billboard worldwide.