Youn Yuh-jung Interviews with US Media Forbes "Son Worried About Attending Awards Ceremony... All Nominees Are Winners"
[Asia Economy Reporter Park Byung-hee] Actress Youn Yuh-jung (photo), who has garnered attention for her incisive interviews as much as the 37 trophies she won for the film Minari, mentioned anti-Asian hate crimes in the United States during an interview with the American economic media Forbes.
According to Forbes on the 12th (local time), Youn Yuh-jung plans to attend the Academy Awards ceremony on the 25th, but said her son living in the U.S. is worried.
Youn said, "I have two sons living in the U.S. My son who lives in Los Angeles (LA) is worried about me coming to the U.S. He said, 'Who knows if you are the actress nominated for the Academy Award? You are just an old woman.' Hate crime perpetrators are targeting older women. He worries that I can't bring bodyguards or anything like that."
Youn added, "It is terrible that my son worries I could be attacked just because I am an old woman."
The Academy has invited Youn Yuh-jung, nominated for Best Supporting Actress, and Han Ye-ri, who also starred in Minari, to attend the ceremony, and the two actresses are reportedly coordinating their schedules.
Forbes reported that following Youn Yuh-jung’s consecutive wins of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Award for Best Supporting Actress and the British Academy Film Award for Best Supporting Actress, she is considered the most likely winner among the five nominees for Best Supporting Actress at the Academy Awards.
Regarding this, Youn expressed that all five nominated actresses are winners. She said, "Honestly, I don’t like competition, especially competition among actors. Actors play different roles in different films. There is no way to compare. Just being nominated means everyone is a winner. People like competition, but I dislike it. This is not the Olympics. Everyone played their roles in different films and did wonderfully."
Although this is her first time appearing in an American film, Youn said that since she spoke Korean in the movie, Minari is not a Hollywood film to her. She said she only acted in Korean and did not expect to receive such great attention from Americans, which she finds very surprising.
Youn also candidly spoke about her experience with divorce. In the 1970s, she was at the peak of her career as an actress when she married and moved to the U.S. She lived in the U.S. for over ten years, then divorced and returned to Korea to resume her acting career.
About her divorce, she said, "At that time, divorce was like a scarlet letter, and there was a perception that I was a 'stubborn woman.' Because I broke the idea that 'a wife must obey her husband and keep her marriage vows,' I had no chance to appear on television or get jobs." She recalled, "It was a terrible time. I tried to take any role to feed my two sons and didn’t care about the pride I once had as a star. I think I became a very mature person from then on."
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