On June 27, Jung Hoyeon attended a hand-printing event by Blue Dragon Series Awards at Incheon Global Campus Main Hall.
All the winners from the very first Blue Dragon Series Awards that took place last year attended the event; among them, there was Jung Hoyeon, who took the Rookie Female Actor Award.
Since it was for her role in Netflix's most successful series in 2021 'Squid Game', one reporter at the hand-printing event could not help but ask Jung Hoyeon how she felt about becoming the global superstar after the series.
In less than 20 days following the release of the series, the number of her Instagram followers jumped from 400,000 to 13.4 million.
It has been two years since 'Squid Game' was premiered, but the number of her followers did not get any lower; it only got higher and higher.
Currently, she has about 21 million followers on Instagram. She is the most-followed Korean actress on the platform.
Jung Hoyeon said, "After the release of 'Squid Game', many renowned stars around the world started following me on Instagram. I felt really grateful for that. It all felt like a dream. Like... When Pharrell Williams started following me back, I was like, 'What...?!' Since I've been a huge fan of every one of them, I just couldn't thank them enough for following me!"
"Since I love Korean food, I visited every Korean restaurant in the cities that I went to. But they just weren't as good as the restaurants in Korea. So, I ended up having lots of Korean cup noodles. They definitely helped me with my home sickness a little."
"But at some point, I got sick of having cup noodles as well. As soon as I got back to Korea, I shoved naeng-myeon (cold buckwheat noodles), seolleongtang (ox bone soup) and tteok-bokki (spicy simmered rice cake) in my mouth.", she laughingly added.
At the end of her brief talk, she wished the new cast of 'Squid Game 2' good luck, "It's not going to be easy, I'm telling you. But I hope you'll all be able to survive. Good luck to you!"
(SBS Star)