Im Soo Jung | 임수정 | About

Im Soo Jung is a South Korean actress and former model. She debuted in 1998 as a cover model for teen magazines, moved into acting with the teen drama "School 4", and first drew critical notice and newcomer awards for Kim Jee Woon's stylish horror "A Tale of Two Sisters" (2003).

The following year "I'm Sorry, I Love You" brought her to a wide audience. Looking much younger than her age, she was cast for a time as an eternal ingenue — the character study "...ing", the horse-racing film "Lump Sugar", and Park Chan Wook's surrealist "I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK".

From 2007 she set about shedding that image with adult roles: Hur Jin Ho's melodrama "Happiness", Choi Dong Hoon's fantasy blockbuster "Jeon Woo Chi: The Taoist Wizard", the romantic comedy "Finding Mr. Destiny", and Lee Yoon Ki's spare break-up film "Come Rain, Come Shine". "All About My Wife" (2012) won her Best Actress at the 33rd Blue Dragon Film Awards and at the Women in Film Korea Awards.

She has worked well outside the mainstream too — the short "El Fin del Mundo", shown at the dOCUMENTA art exhibition, and Aditya Assarat's "Phuket" opposite the Thai actor Sorapong Chatree — and returned to television with "Chicago Typewriter" (2017), thirteen years after "I'm Sorry, I Love You", followed by "Search: WWW" (2019) and "Melancholia" (2021). In 2017 she was named cultural ambassador for the UK-Korea Creative Futures exchange.

Her management has moved several times: SidusHQ, then KeyEast, then YNK Entertainment from October 2015, then King Kong by Starship until that contract lapsed in August 2022, and MYM Entertainment from November 2024.

She said in a 2021 interview that she had become vegan and an advocate for animal rights, after a trip with an acquaintance changed how she ate: "As a result, I naturally became interested in animal welfare and the environment. In the end, it was all connected." She avoids leather on set where she can, and imitation leather and fur too, on the view that convincing fakes only sustain demand for the real thing.