Actress Yoon Yeo-jung (77, in the photo) revealed her son’s coming out for the first time in a foreign press interview. In an interview with People on the 19th (local time), Yoon Yeo-jung said, “My personal life story is deeply related to this movie (‘Minari’) because my eldest son is gay.” It is unusual for Yoon Yeo-jung to personally disclose her family history, including her son.
Earlier, in an interview with the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, Yoon Yeo-jung also said, “My eldest son came out as gay in 2000. When same-sex marriage was legalized in New York, I held his wedding there. Because same-sex marriage was still a secret in Korea, the whole family went to New York.”
The movie ‘Minari’ is a remake of the 1993 film of the same name directed by Lee Isaac Chung. The original ‘Minari’ is a work by Taiwanese director Ang Lee, telling the story of Simon, a gay lover of Wei Tong, who lives in New York and ends up having a ‘fake marriage’ with Wei Wei due to pressure from his parents. The original film won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. In the remake, the nationality of the main character was changed to Korean. Yoon Yeo-jung played the role of the main character’s grandmother in this film.
Yoon Yeo-jung originally was cast to play the mother in ‘Minari,’ but she revealed that she was switched to the role of the grandmother during the casting process. Yoon Yeo-jung said, “When I first received the script, the main character was over thirty, so I thought I could play the mother role. However, actor Han Ye-ri (born in 1998) was cast as the lead, and she was much younger than expected, so I requested to change to the role of the grandmother,” adding, “The line in the movie where I say to my grandson, ‘(No matter who you are) you are my grandson,’ comes from my personal experience.”