Cho Yi-hyun

The failed exam that changed a career

Cho Yi-hyun never planned to become an actress when she enrolled at the Seoul arts school. Her original goal was musical theater. But fate changed course when she failed a dance exam and decided to try acting so she wouldn't lose her place in the course.

In 2017, she made her debut in the web series Sweet Revenge. It was a small role that barely lasted a few minutes on screen. It taught her that the camera demanded a restraint that stage theater had not yet taught her.

And the gamble paid off.

She signed with JYP Entertainment as a trainee while finishing her university studies at Kyung Hee University. During that stage she filmed Bad Papa and Less Than Evil in 2018. They were supporting roles, but they let her see up close how the machinery of Korean television worked.

Medical residency and a broken anonymity

In 2020, the project came along that changed how the industry saw her. She played Jang Yun-bok in Hospital Playlist. Audiences connected with that promising medical student who always carried a notebook and followed the doctors with a mix of fear and admiration.

Sharing the set with veteran actors pushed her to raise her technical standards. She shot two seasons of the series between 2020 and 2021. That shoot added more than 400 hours of on-set work before the general public even knew her name outside South Korea.

Korean television often types young actors into student roles, but she managed to give her character an unusual maturity.

The Zombie Outbreak

Netflix premiered All of Us Are Dead in January 2022. Cho Yi-hyun played Choi Nam-ra, the cold class representative who becomes infected with a virus but keeps her human consciousness. The shoot was physically exhausting due to the combat choreography and the use of prosthetics.

She spent months training erratic body movements to simulate the partial transformation. But the hardest part was shooting action scenes while wearing contact lenses that nearly blocked her vision during night shoots.

That production reached number one in 91 countries during its first week on air.

There was no turning back.

In 2022, she starred in the remake of the film Ditto. She played a 1999 college student who communicates by radio with a boy from the future. It was a gentle, slow-paced romantic break after the explicit violence of the zombies.

Period Films and Iron-Clad Contracts

The industry kept asking for her return to long-running television. In 2023, she took on the challenge of historical comedy with The Matchmakers. The script demanded a comedic range and a command of archaic language that she had never explored on national television until then.

Still, her professional priority remained managing her image through Artist Company, the agency founded by Lee Jung-jae. The actress earns a salary three times her 2019 fee for every episode recorded since her move to global streaming platforms.

Preproduction on the second season of All of Us Are Dead was set for late 2024. The contract includes strict confidentiality clauses about the storyline and the fate of her character. Location shooting in Seoul for her 2025 projects wrapped up at an average temperature of four degrees below zero.