Gong Seung-yeon

A Detour Into Acting

Seven years of training at SM Entertainment were not enough to put her on a stage with a microphone. Yoo Seung-yeon (her real name) spent nearly a decade preparing to become a K-pop star, but fate had other plans. She shared dance sessions with the future members of Red Velvet and f(x) while the Korean system shaped her for a music debut that never happened.

In the end, she decided that acting was her place and switched agencies in 2012. That year she landed a supporting role in I Love Lee Tae-ri and began building an identity of her own, far from group choreography. It wasn't an easy path, since the industry tends to scrutinize those who leave the idol training system.

And the gamble paid off.

In 2015, her face began to be familiar to the general public thanks to Heard It Through the Grapevine. That role as an ambitious sister let her work under director Ahn Pan-seok, who avoids the usual tricks of Korean television. That same year she won the Best New Actress award at the SBS Drama Awards, confirming that leaving SM Entertainment was not a failure but a settling of accounts with her true calling.

The Silence of Aloners

Television brought her fame, but film earned her the respect of international critics. In 2021, she starred in Aloners (a small film that dissects urban loneliness in Seoul). Her performance as Jina (a woman who avoids any unnecessary human contact) is an exercise in absolute restraint that steers clear of the dramatic histrionics so common in the genre.

In this film, the camera stays close to her face for ninety minutes, because the script required the weight of the story to rest on her silences rather than her dialogue. Her work in this film earned her the Best Actress award at the Jeonju International Film Festival and also at the Blue Dragon Film Awards (the Korean equivalent of the Goya Awards).

That was the exact moment she stopped being known to the media as the sister of Twice's Jeongyeon.

But her success on the independent circuit did not keep her away from big-budget productions. In 2021, she took part in Bulgasal: Immortal Souls (a dark fantasy series with a budget of 40,000 million won). There she played Dan Sol in a plot that jumped between past and present with a narrative complexity that tested the endurance of the production crew.

Action and Rural Horror

In 2022, she took on the role of Song Seol in The First Responders. This series about medical and police emergencies required a physically demanding shoot on real locations. The production continued until 2023 with a second season in which her character gained emotional weight in the urban rescue storylines.

It hasn't all been intense drama or police action.

In 2024, she released Handsome Guys, a horror comedy that parodies the tropes of American cabin-in-the-woods movies. She plays Mi-na in the film, which also stars Lee Sung-min and Lee Hee-joon. Filming took place mainly on rural locations and marked a shift toward physical comedy and bloody satire.

The film drew 1.6 million moviegoers in South Korean theaters during its first month in release.