Park Hye-Jin

Park Hye-Jin (박혜진) is one of South Korea's most dependable character actors, with a career spanning more than three decades across stage, film, and television. Born September 21, 1958, she trained in theater and built early credentials in stage productions before transitioning to screen work, bringing a distinctive groundedness to every role. Her international breakthrough came through all three seasons of Netflix's Squid Game (2021, 2022, 2024), where she played Cho Sang-woo's mother , a devastatingly ordinary woman whose grief anchored some of the series' most emotionally intense moments. The performance resonated far beyond Korean audiences and cemented her status as a character actor of international standing.

Her broader credits demonstrate range across genre and register: the social thriller Silenced (2011), the warmly observed medical ensemble Hospital Playlist (2020-2021), the prison drama Prison Playbook (2017-2018), the period sci-fi Gyeongseong Creature (2023), and Apple TV+'s sweeping multigenerational epic Pachinko (2022). In Netflix's Made in Korea (2026), the first major India-Korea co-production on a global streaming platform, she plays Yeon-Ok , adding another precisely observed character to a career built on exactness and restraint.