Moon So-ri
Moon So-ri is an actor, born 1974.
An actress with a Venice prize on the shelf turns up in the cast list of 1987: When the Day Comes as "Protester". That is Moon So-ri's career in a single line. Born in Busan in 1974, she started on stage with the theatre company Hangang, made her feature debut in Lee Chang-dong's Peppermint Candy, and won the Marcello Mastroianni Award at the Venice International Film Festival for Oasis, in which she plays Han Gong-ju.
Oasis is what made her internationally legible, and it also set the terms for everything after. She takes parts other actresses would consider punishing, plays them without any appeal to the audience's sympathy, and refuses to signal that acting is occurring. Since then she has worked at every available scale. She has been a repeat presence in Hong Sang-soo's talky comedies, in Like You Know It All, Ha Ha Ha and In Another Country, and she took Hideko's Aunt in The Handmaiden and a senior secretary in Hellbound, roles a star of her standing could comfortably have turned down.
She directs as well. And in her fifties she has had the busiest television run of her career: Queenmaker, Jeongnyeon: The Star Is Born, and Oh Ae-sun in When Life Gives You Tangerines, which found the largest audience of anything she has done.
Movies (36)
- The Handmaiden (2016)
- A Good Lawyer's Wife (2003)
- The Housemaid (2010)
- Seoul Vibe (2022)
- Bewitching Attraction (2006)
- Peppermint Candy (2000)
- Little Forest (2018)
- Juror 8 (2019)
- Oasis (2002)
- 1987: When the Day Comes (2017)
- Maggie (2019)
- Leafie, a Hen Into the Wild (2011)
- Ari Ari the Korean Cinema (2012)
- Vanishing Time: A Boy Who Returned (2016)
- The Spy: Undercover Operation (2013)
- The Mayor (2017)
- I Want to Know Your Parents (2022)
- Ha Ha Ha (2010)
- Ode to the Goose (2018)
- A Little Pond (2010)
- An Ethics Lesson (2013)
- Venice 70: Future Reloaded (2013)
- The President's Barber (2004)
- Venus Talk (2014)
- Like You Know It All (2009)
- In Another Country (2012)
- Bravo, My Life! (2005)
- Manshin: Ten Thousand Spirits (2014)
- Three Sisters (2021)
- Family Ties (2006)
TV (20)
- When Life Gives You Tangerines (2025)
- The Apartment Job (2026)
- The Manager (2018)
- Movie Room (2018)
- Baeksang Arts Awards (2012)
- Hellbound (2021)
- The Legend of the Blue Sea (2016)
- Modern Korea (2019)
- Our Movie (2025)
- Queenmaker (2023)
- Life (2018)
- SF8 (2020)
- The School Nurse Files (2020)
- Jeongnyeon: The Star is Born (2024)
- The Legend (2007)
- May Food Bless You (2018)
- Off the Grid (2021)
- On the Verge of Insanity (2021)
- My Life's Golden Age (2008)
- RACE (2023)
Where to start with Moon So-ri
There is no gentle way in. Oasis is the essential one and I would not soften that: a difficult film about two people the world has written off, and her work in it is among the most committed screen acting South Korea has produced. Go in rested.
Peppermint Candy is the other Lee Chang-dong film and the better first watch if you want the era rather than the endurance. For something lighter, In Another Country and Ha Ha Ha are Hong Sang-soo at his most relaxed, and she is very funny in both, which tends to surprise people.
The Handmaiden is the glossiest thing she appears in, though her part is small. On television, When Life Gives You Tangerines hands her a whole life to play, Jeongnyeon: The Star is Born leans on her stage background, and Hellbound is the strangest use anyone has made of her.