At the heart of Netflix’s latest big swing at prestige movies is an extremely precocious 13-year-old. Okja, the story of a girl named Mija palling around with a massive superpig in a whimsical mountain setting—a fantastical friendship in the vein of classics like My Neighbor Totoro—stars actress Ahn Seo-hyun in the main role. She’s a bundle of fierceness and unrattled stoicism in a high-concept film replete with madcap plot points, the kind we’ve come to expect from celebrated director Bong Joon-ho and his top-tier talent (Tilda Swinton, Jake Gyllenhaal, Paul Dano). Though Seo-hyun was only 11 when she was cast (and 12 when she filmed), she holds our gaze in the palm of her hand. She’s a bottle-rocket talent and a surprisingly adept action star, someone who will sear a lasting impression on anyone who watches Okja once it’s available to stream, or see in limited theatrical release, on June 28.
In real life, Seo-hyun is petite and polite, with long bangs skirting her eyes. She speaks Korean, her first language, during interviews, but there are occasions where she happily blurts something in English to really convey her point—like when she’s talking about Tilda Swinton. The Oscar-winning actress was kind and protective of the young star on set, Seo-hyun’s translator explains, even taking her to see Finding Dory when they had some free time.
“I loved it,” Seo-hyun gushes in English.
In fact, all of her co-stars were warm and protective, she says. When they filmed certain scenes in New York, Paul Dano took her to see a musical. Jake Gyllenhaal sent her a black luggage set as a wrap gift. Director Bong Joon-ho gave her near-total control of her character, which, for an actor, is one of the greatest gifts of all. When she was cast, Seo-hyun quickly rattled off a number of ideas to the director for what motivated Mija in certain scenes, to the point where she was even illuminating ideas to Joon-ho, who created the character and wrote the script. “Oh, this is why she does this,” she recalls the director saying. In the script, there was “an idea of who Mija was, [but] it was still kind of in the dark,” she says. Seo-hyun gave it the spark of life.
In the film, Mija is a quiet girl living in beatific mountains with her grandfather and Okja, a superpig gifted to her family by a livestock company called the Mirando Corporation, led by a slightly manic woman named Lucy Mirando (Swinton). But after a few idyllic years, the company decides it’s time to take Okja back and make him serve the purpose they bred him for, sending along deranged zoologist Dr. Johnny Wilcox (Gyllenhaal) to pignap him. A fearless Mija immediately goes after them, aided along the way by an extremist group called the Animal Liberation Front, which is led by a man named Jay (Dano).
The role is surprisingly physical, with Seo-hyun spending nearly half her time running after someone or something, bursting through glass, leaping from one thing to the next. The actress started training for the role before filming, but didn’t get to use most of what she learned, as Joon-ho ultimately employed stunt performers or special effects for most of the scenes.
On screen, Seo-hyun also spends a lot of time acting with Okja, a friendly C.G.I. creature with the temperament of a dog and the size of a growing triceratops. On set, she was actually acting with a sponge-filled, Okja-sized puppet nicknamed “Stuffy.” At first, the young star was worried about how she’d convincingly build that necessary connection to it. “How will I express falling in love with this inanimate object?” she muses in Korean.
Thankfully, she found her way in thanks to a man named Steve, who operated Stuffy, playing to him instead of to the giant puppet. On the final day of shooting with Stuffy and Steve, Seo-hyun felt like she was “saying goodbye to a little pet she had for 10 years,” her translator explains.
Seo-hyun has seen the film about four or five times now, she reckons, including sitting through the contentious Cannes premiere and the more welcoming New York City premiere, attended by the film’s stars and splashy producers like Brad Pitt. At a late-night after-party at the Top of the Standard, she quietly stood in the corner of the room, while adults all around her sipped Champagne and swapped industry gossip—a perfect dichotomy of the surreal life of a talented child actor wrapping up a whirlwind press tour. If Okja gets the praise it deserves (and it really is quite lovely), this won’t be the last time Seo-hyun finds herself espousing her craft and balancing the industry’s everyday fishbowl of oddities. But if she can handle Joon-ho’s dark, ethereal worlds and the stranger-than-fiction landscape of Hollywood, she can probably handle anything.
Claire Underwood, House of Cards
She may have started out as Frank Underwood’s cool, if slightly icy, wife who stands on the sidelines, but Claire Underwood (played by Robin Wright) quickly transforms into the show’s stealthy Lady Macbeth with a chic pixie cut, delivering quiet, but shocking blows to her enemies. “I’m willing to let your child wither and die inside you,” she once said to a pregnant former employee. “Am I really the sort of enemy you want to make?” Not. At. All.
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Frank Underwood, House of Cards
Well, if it isn’t the most corrupt, murderous fictional president to ever step foot in the White House. Frank Underwood (played by Kevin Spacey) is basically a caricature of a dirty politician—he’s ruthless, manipulative, power-hungry, and violent, willing to do or say anything to stay at the top of the food chain. Get in his way and prepare to be bowled over—or shoved in front of a moving train.
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Vee, Orange Is the New Black
Orange Is the New Black is filled season to season with new villains, from the Season 1 terror of crazed religious freak Pennsatucky (who is, thankfully, reformed now), to Season 4’s sadistic guard who forces an inmate to eat a baby mouse. But none have had the perfect open and close villainy of Vee (played by Lorraine Toussaint) in Season 2, a manipulative force who will do whatever it takes to get people to do her bidding, whether it requires shallow sweet talk or a blunt smack in the head.
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Kilgrave, Jessica Jones
Kilgrave (played by David Tennant) showed us exactly what can happen when an incredible power gets into the wrong hands. The Marvel baddie had the power to control other people, a chilling gift he used to achieve violent ends.
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Pablo Escobar, Narcos
Sometimes a show’s greatest villain can also be its star. Pablo Escobar (played by Wagner Moura) on Narcos is just that, and is based on the real life drug lord who got rich by peddling cocaine in Colombia, leaving a trail of blood and terror in his wake.
By Daniel Daza/Netflix/Everett Collection.
Count Olaf, A Series of Unfortunate Events
There are few things more villainous than committing yourself to a lifetime mission of killing children. Alas, that’s Olaf’s (played by Neil Patrick Harris) lot in life, a commitment that constantly requires him to take his cartoonish villainy to the next level, constantly disguising himself so he can finally rid the world of those damn Baudelaire orphans.
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Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt may be a comedy, but it still has one of the most twisted plot lines around, thanks to the Reverend (played by Jon Hamm). He trapped Kimmy and three other women in a bunker for 15 years, forcing Kimmy to marry him and tricking all the women into thinking the world was on the verge of an apocalypse.
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Cottonmouth, Luke Cage
He may be seductive, but he’s also a snake. Cottonmouth (played by Mahershala Ali) was one of the more ruthless overlords of Harlem, a man with a perilously short temper and an unquenchable thirst for the total destruction of his enemies.
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The Demogorgon, Stranger Things
Dr. Martin Brenner, Eleven’s evil father, might seem like the obvious villain on this show. And don’t get us wrong, he’s definitely a villain . . . but, when push comes to shove you have to admit you would rather be up against him than the Demogorgon (played by a suited up Mark Steger), the horrifying demon-like creature who lives in the Upside-Down and feasts on both fear and flesh.
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Dr. Hunter Aloysius, The OA
He was a villain who swore he was doing work in the name of a greater good. Aloysius (Jason Isaacs) trapped literal angels in his basement for years so he could conduct scientific experiments on them—experiments that included killing them over and over and wiping their memories so they couldn’t remember what he did to them.
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Bryce, 13 Reasons Why
From Hannah’s perspective, technically everyone who got a tape is a villain of sorts. However, none were more insidious than Bryce (Justin Prentice), the jock who was not only your typical high school bully, but also later revealed to be a serial rapist.
By Beth Dubber/Netflix.
Rory Gilmore, the Gilmore Girls revival
We’re only kind of kidding. Sure, Rory (Alexis Bledel) was the precocious protagonist of the original series, but the all grown up version in Netflix’s revival is a bit of a narcissistic mess, consistently messing up career opportunities, sleeping with her married ex-boyfriend (although it takes two to play, Logan, you flawed, filthy rich philanderer) while straight up forgetting her actual boyfriend—poor Paul.
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