Jeon Jong-seo
Jeon Jong-seo is an actor, born 1994.
Almost nobody gets a first job like this one. Jeon Jong-seo, born in Seoul in 1994 and also credited as Rachel Jun, made her screen debut in a leading role in Lee Chang-dong's Burning (2018), a film that has been argued about ever since.
What she did there set the terms for everything after it. Hae-mi is written as a person the other characters cannot pin down, and Jeon plays that as an actual quality rather than as a puzzle to be solved: warm, unreliable, immediate, impossible to read a scene ahead. The Call (2020) took the same unreadability and turned it hostile, and it won her the Baeksang Arts Award for Best Actress.
Since then she has moved deliberately between registers. She was Tokyo in Money Heist: Korea (2022), the Netflix remake that put her in front of a global audience, took the lead in the English-language Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon, and carried Ballerina (2023), a stylised Korean revenge film built almost entirely around her stillness. Television has kept her busy with Bargain (2022), the historical Queen Woo (2024) and the romantic comedy Wedding Impossible (2024), and the film Project Y is listed for 2026. For an actor barely eight years into a career, that is an unusually wide spread and very little repetition.
Movies (7)
TV (5)
Where to start with Jeon Jong-seo
Nobody should start anywhere but Burning. It is a slow, unnerving film about class and obsession, and her debut performance is the engine of the whole thing. If you watch only one title here, that is the one.
The Call is the immediate follow-up and the hard swerve, a thriller that lets her be genuinely frightening rather than merely troubled, and it is the performance that won the award. Money Heist: Korea - Joint Economic Area is the accessible entry point, a heist series with a large cast in which her Tokyo is the most watchable element. Ballerina is the stylish one, all neon and choreography, best approached for mood over plot. Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon is the strangest, an American oddity that leans on her physical performance, Nothing Serious is the light option if the thrillers are too much, and Queen Woo is the period showcase.