Kim You-jung

Kim You-jung started working before she can have understood it was work: a confectionery model at four, an acting debut in 2003, and then years as one of the most in-demand child actresses in South Korea, which earned her the press label 'Nation's Little Sister'.

The specific job she did better than anyone was playing the younger version of the heroine. Dong Yi, The Moon Embracing the Sun, Painter of the Wind, Iljimae, May Queen: the credit line reads '(young)' over and over. It is a strange assignment, because you have to establish a character the audience will follow for a whole series and then hand her to another actress once the story catches up, and Kim was cast for it constantly because she could carry a scene without mugging. She was also placed inside films for grown-ups very early, as a child in Lady Vengeance and The Chaser, where the job is to be an ordinary kid in the middle of something bleak.

Love in the Moonlight, in 2016, was the handover. It was her first starring role and it made her a leading actress rather than a graduate of child acting. In 2017 she came eighth on the Forbes Korea Power Celebrity list, the youngest person in that top ten.

Since then the choices have been deliberately mixed: romantic comedy in Clean with Passion for Now and Backstreet Rookie, coming-of-age in 20th Century Girl, occult horror in The 8th Night, and darker recent turns in Chicken Nugget and Dear X. The child-star ledger usually reads worse than this one.