photography LIZZIE KLEIN
Ji-young Yoo is no stranger to appearing alongside cinematic titans. In the Prime Video series Expats, she played the daydreaming babysitter of Nicole Kidman’s character’s kid, and in this year’s Freaky Tales, a Nazi-slaying punk opposite Pedro Pascal. But when she got to the set of her latest film Until Dawn, she’d swapped them out for an actual titan – an intimidatingly tall stunt actor named Tibor, draped in decaying zombie prosthetics.
The 25-year-old stars in a new horror film based on the stressful and terrifying video game of the same name. “I’m a scaredy cat,” she says, speaking from her LA bedroom the week the film is set to hit theaters. “And I think I’ve [completed] maybe two video games: Spider-Man and Nintendogs.”
Yoo’s personal tastes are reflective of her demeanour: soft, intelligent, but neither stern or too serious. She spent her Easter weekend watching the anniversary screening of 2005’s Pride and Prejudice with her girls, after years spent burning through DVD copies.
Set on a rainy night in an anonymous American town, Until Dawn follows a group of friends who stumble upon the town’s empty and dilapidated visitor’s centre. Led by the film’s protagonist Clover (Ella Rubin), the gang is looking for her sister, who went missing around a year ago. But little do they know that by passing over the threshold they’ve entered into a violent time loop where they are doomed to die violently every night at the hands of increasingly rabid creatures––or find a way to survive until dawn and escape. It’s gnarly as hell and knowingly ridiculous, like a rallying cry against the genre’s pivot to the cerebral, chin-stroking stuff. “People keep asking me if Until Dawn is good and I’m like, ‘I don’t know!’” Yoo says, as if she’s watched it mostly with her hands over her eyes. “All I know is that I’m really scared.”
“After a while, you’re like, ‘Oh, what am I doing today? Oh, I’m dying.’”
In the movie, Yoo plays Megan, the spiritually-minded girl who’s a loyal friend to Clover. Of all of Yoo’s previous characters, Megan feels the most like her. Yoo thinks ghosts are kicking around nowadays not out of malevolence, but because they’re interested in wi-fi and aircon, and “I really believe in karmic cycles,” she says. “Megan’s always trying to, like, mediate and keep the vibes cool between friends, and is really just doing all of this to help Clover grieve and hopefully help her be able to move on with her life.”
They are, of course, put through hell to get there. Yoo’s first (of many) deaths in Until Dawn was the first death scene she’d ever shot. It wasn’t a slow or emotional set-up: she gets her face smashed into some floorboards. “After you get a few deaths in, you’re like, you know, ‘Another day, another death’” she says, laughing. “I think during the final week of filming, I died three or four times, because sometimes you have to go back and shoot a different angle of the same death. So you’re dying all the time. There was at least one death every single week of production. After a while, you’re like, ‘Oh, what am I doing today? Oh, I’m dying.’”
Yoo’s fear of horror wasn’t an inherited trait. Her mother loves the stuff, counting the original 1976 version of The Omen as one of her favorites. Thankfully, there was some lighter fare in there too, which wound up being what Yoo––born and raised in Denver, Colorado––was raised on: lustrous, vintage musicals like Singin’ in the Rain and The Sound of Music. These same films were the ones that taught Yoo’s mother how to speak English. “I am probably from the last generation of Blockbuster kids,” Yoo recalls. “My family and I would go there every week, and we would either rent a movie or buy one of those $3.99 or $7.99 DVDs they would sell.” (To this day, the DVD shelf in her family home still has plenty of titles with the security strip snipped out of the covers.) After the movie, she’d dig into the special features, intrigued by the mechanics of how a film was made. “The teamwork and all of the pieces that have to function together to make a great film was so exciting to me,” she says. Yoo was going to dance classes back then (that’s what early musical exposure will do to you), but these long documentaries on the making of cinema gave her an urge to explore drama too.
When she was 15, she spent a few weeks in the mountain town of Steamboat Springs, a three-hour drive from Denver, at a Perry-Mansfield Performing Arts Camp. Yoo and her peers rehearsed musicals in nature, took “Navy showers” to conserve water, surrounded by trees and horses. “You would turn in your phone and would only get it on Saturdays so you could call your family and let them know how you’re doing,” she remembers. “I loved it, because it taught me how to focus on what was in front of me. You just got to make art with a bunch of kids who are also interested in making art.” On the last night, the entire camp stayed up all night––a longstanding tradition at the camp that counts Dustin Hoffman as an alumni. A meteor shower fell over the tree tops. “It felt like kismet,” Yoo says, shooting stars over a camp of young actors desperate to make it.
After she graduated high school, she left Denver for California, studying Cinema and Media at the University of Southern California, rather than straight drama. Back home, she’d tried out theater and watched a bunch of films, “but I really wanted to get a more holistic view of film in the world that I wanted to enter into,” she says. “The more experience that you get outside of acting, the more you can understand what everyone else’s jobs are on set, and the better you can do your job.”
There, she wrote dozens of essays on film theory, studying the masters, becoming obsessed with the work of Wong Kar-wai. When she was 21, halfway through her degree, she took a leave of absence to shoot Lulu Wang’s Expats, that aforementioned Nicole Kidman-starring series, in Hong Kong. The series’ stills photographer, Jupiter Wong, would often tell Yoo: “have eyes like Tony Leung”, a reference to the long-time Wong Kar-wai collaborator. Later, “I was in a museum staring at an image from one of Wong Kar-wai’s films, and I looked at the credit,” Yoo recalls. Jupiter had worked with Leung on some of Wong’s most cherished masterworks.
She turned 22 in Hong Kong. It felt like something was shifting. Having lived her whole life in Denver with Korean heritage, living in Hong Kong was a different experience, “I was exploring my Asian American identity there. A lot of people assumed I belonged in Hong Kong and would speak to me in Cantonese, I’d always have to apologize, which is the opposite of how I experience life in America.” In the US, she’d grown used to microaggressions. People questioning her––“Where are you from” and “Surely you’re not from the US”––when Korean isn’t even her first language. “I really treasure that time [in Hong Kong],” she says.
Despite only being 25, life has moved quickly. Yoo’s still not been back to college since Expats took her away from it, because a series of films followed. She’s considering finishing her degree eventually, but college debt forgiveness in the States looks like it’s out the window and a year of studying at USC now costs $100,000. There are more tempting things on her plate. She’d like to do a straight comedy, or return to theater, maybe in New York or on London’s West End.
What’s grounding her is her inability to shake the “goofiness” she’s known for amongst her friends. The idea of an actor taking themselves overly seriously is weird to her. “We do so many embarrassing things at work, I think it’d be really hard for me to take myself seriously,” she says. “Like, you got mauled by a mythical creature today at work, then you’re gonna get a big head about it?” She bursts into laughter. “I don’t know, man!”
Until Dawn is in UK and US theaters from 25 April
WRITTEN BY: Douglas Greenwood
PHOTOGRAPHY BY: Lizzie Klein