Indie drama Bedford Park might just prove to be Korean actress Moon Choi’s big break in the U.S. film industry — but she’s nonetheless a little apprehensive about how it will play for the fans who know her work best.

“Thinking about the Korean audience, I do get a bit nervous because I don’t know what to expect,” she tells The Hollywood Reporter. After winning an award at Sundance and earning strong reviews in Toronto, Bedford Park is finally meeting Korean moviegoers this week at the Busan International Film Festival — but her fans there will be seeing a rather different side of the star they met in K-dramas like Mistress (2018) or Now, We Are Breaking Up (2021).

Written and directed by first-time feature filmmaker Stephanie Ahn, Bedford Park stars Choi as Audrey, a 36-year-old Brooklyn physical therapist whose mother’s car accident summons her back to the suburban New Jersey home she has never quite escaped emotionally. The other driver is Eli (rising Korean star Son Sukku of The Roundup and D.P. fame), a prickly former wrestler and Korean adoptee raised by a neglectful white mother.

When Audrey visits Eli to share insurance info, the encounter descends into a heated argument over who was responsible for the crash. Their second meeting takes a harrowing turn when Audrey suffers a miscarriage on Eli’s doorstep. Soon, a bond begins to emerge between the two, as they glimpse a kindred spirit hidden beneath each other’s self-defenses. But their intimacy is messy and hard-won, more a meeting of two wounded Asian American survivors and strivers than the typical meet-cute of Korean romances.

Choi says she’s uncertain how the story’s milieu of immigrant struggle will resonate with the crowd in Busan, and she suspects “they’re going to be a little bit surprised by just how rated R it is.” Audrey is sexually forthright, self-destructive and resistant to her parents’ preferred version of success, unwilling to become the dutiful daughter they want, even as she feels indebted to their sacrifices. Eli’s fractured family history has left him similarly scarred.

But the underlying emotion, Choi believes, should travel.

“The film is primarily a family drama and a love story between two people who feel seen for the first time when they meet someone who shares a certain kind of struggle from the past,” she explains.

Going into the film’s Sundance premiere, she had wondered whether the characters’ emotional burdens might feel specifically Asian, or unique to immigrant life. But the overwhelmingly positive response from viewers in Park City with neither experience was a gratifying surprise.

“I saw so many in the audience crying at the end,” Choi recalls.

Busan is also welcoming her as a member of its main competition jury, led by Chinese master Zhang Yimou. For Choi, who has previously judged shorts, the prospect of assessing features alongside such company is both an honor and another exciting challenge (Bedford Park is screening in the festival’s noncompetitive Flash Forward section).

Feeling her way through unfamiliar worlds has been something of a lifelong predicament and opportunity for Choi. Born in Seoul, she moved to Japan at nine, following her father’s banking career. She attended a school in Osaka for ethnic Koreans where lessons were taught in Japanese, later returned to Seoul and eventually moved to New Jersey, where she learned English. Each relocation made her a fresh version of the outsider.

“As a kid, I always felt alienated, even when I was back in Korea,” she says. “In Osaka, I tried to fit in with my Japanese friends; back in Seoul, I was viewed as that girl from Japan. In New Jersey, I was trying to learn English and starting all over again.”

At around 11, she played the lead in a school production of the classic Korean play The Tale of Sim Cheong and found unexpected relief in the imaginary.

“I didn’t have to be Korean. I didn’t have to be Japanese. I just had to play the character,” she remembers. “So I felt very grounded, in a surprising way, and I felt like this was something that I would love to pursue.”

She later took acting classes in New Jersey and joined the theater club on her first day of university in Seoul, eventually starring in a series of plays. After an unsuccessful attempt to enter drama school in London, a friend persuaded the self-described theater kid to audition for her first Korean movie.

She was thrilled to instantly land a starring role in the girls’ weightlifting drama Lifting King Kong (2009) — but the transition from stage to set was bruising. Accustomed to only winning praise in the theater, Choi says she struggled with the harsh demands of Korean film sets of the time, often going home in tears after her director berated her for failing to deliver the performance he wanted. She also struggled with the unfamiliar aspects of filmmaking. “I didn’t know how to cry on cue; I didn’t know how to block; I didn’t really understand how to perform for a camera,” she says. But rather than retreating to the stage, she decided to seek out short films and independent productions to master the mechanics of movie acting.

Her breakthrough came in 2017 with the South Korean biographical period drama Anarchist From Colony, in which she played the real-life Japanese anarchist Kaneko Fumiko. For the first time, the role allowed her to leverage her blended identity and Japanese fluency as a professional asset. The next year, she earned Busan’s actor of the year award for her performance in Korean in Han Ka-ram’s acclaimed drama Our Body.

But despite her English abilities, auditioning in Hollywood never occurred to her as a viable possibility — perhaps because so few Korean stars have successfully crossed over to the U.S. industry, she says.

That changed in 2019, when her agent, on a whim, sent her Ahn’s screenplay, then titled Audrey Park. Choi usually prints scripts and settles at her desk to read them, but she opened this one on her phone and found herself so engrossed in Audrey’s story that she kept scrolling until the final page. She quickly filmed and sent off some self-tapes but didn’t expect much, assuming the director would have plenty of options among Korean American actors closer to home. Eventually, however, she was invited to New York to audition and landed the role.

“When I got the part, I was like, ‘Okay, this is it. This is my debut in Hollywood. I’m going to make it there now too,’” she recalls.

A few months later, the pandemic hit and the project was derailed as production shut down across the globe. After several years of waiting, Ahn and Choi made a proof-of-concept video to help attract new financing. They filmed the two lead characters’ contentious first encounter, with American actor Clayne Crawford as Eli, who was originally written to be a white guy. Back in Seoul, Choi showed the footage to film industry contacts. Among them was Son, a close friend and frequent stage collaborator whose career was in the process of exploding after his starring parts in the hit drama My Liberation Notes and action blockbuster The Roundup.

“This looks good — if the character were a Korean guy, I would love to do it,” she recalls him saying. Choi could instantly picture Son in the role: his physicality, his rough charisma and the familiarity they had developed over multiple stage projects. He had also lived in Chicago and was among the very few major male stars of his generation who spoke fluent English. She proposed to Ahn that Eli become a Korean American adoptee instead. Ahn watched Son’s work, met him over Zoom and agreed.

Son’s rising star power then proved vital in unlocking financing. Hyundai Motor Company agreed to back the project, making Bedford Park the automaker’s first investment in an independent feature (the company had previously collaborated with Son on a branded short). By 2025, the cameras were finally rolling, with Choi also serving as an executive producer.

The casting shift gave the love story a different cultural dynamic: two people connected to Korea in profoundly different ways, recognizing something in each other that neither could easily explain. For Choi, the project has also become another demonstration of what her own border-crossing background might make possible. Sony Pictures Classics will release Bedford Park in the U.S., with a rollout expected next year. Seoul-based distributor BY4M is planning a wide theatrical run in Korea in February or March.

In the meantime, Choi has returned — happily this time — to the theater. In September, she completed the New York run of Simon Stone’s Korean-language adaptation of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard at the Park Avenue Armory, with pioneering Korean screen icon Jeon Do-yeon playing her mother. For Choi, the play meant performing opposite an actress she has idolized since her youth. Jeon became the first Korean actress to win the Cannes Film Festival’s best actress prize in 2007 for Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine, and she is now back in the awards conversation with her widely acclaimed performance in the director’s Netflix-backed Oscar contender Possible Love.

“She was my hero and my role model. I grew up watching her films. I grew up watching Lee Chang-dong’s films,” Choi says.

After three years collaborating on international stagings of the play, Jeon offered some encouragement that Choi says she is still absorbing. On their final night, the veteran took her hand and urged her to recognize and embrace her own abilities — and to chase the rare opportunity that her unique background has opened up.

“The gist of it is that she told me to pursue this path that no one has ever walked before as a Korean actress, because I’m multilingual. That made me really emotional,” Choi says. “Saying it still makes me emotional right now.”

Choi now plans to audition in the U.S. while continuing to pursue projects in Korea, where she has another play scheduled for the spring. The goal is not to abandon one home for another, but to explore whether a balance between two industry bases is possible.

“For now, my focus is to find a powerful story like Bedford Park in the U.S. or Korea, whether it be a film or TV series or any kind of medium,” she says. “I don’t know what to expect. But I am open to this new journey.”

Try telling Londoners that cinema is dead and they will direct you to the BFI Imax cinema on the Southbank, where Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is still playing to sold-out houses nearly three months after its release. But if you’ve been there, done that, 2026 still has some surprises left up its sleeve, and plenty of other titles will be jockeying for your consideration once the Oscar landscape starts to take shape.

For the moment, that race is still wide open; luckily, Deadline’s Contenders Film: London event taking place Saturday at the Ham Yard Hotel is here to help you make sense of an already overcrowded calendar. Our event is a one-stop shop for movie fans, packed with preview clips, star-studded panels and insider insights from behind-the-scenes players.

A good place to start would be two animation world premieres coming to the capital in October. We open the day with Pixar’s neo-noir science fiction mystery Ray Gunn, welcoming writer-director-producer Brad Bird and composer Michael Giacchino to the stage. Later in the day, we’ll have director-producer Travis Knight, cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, composer Dario Marianelli and costume designer Deb Cook on hand to present Laika’s magical stop-motion fantasy Wildwood.

Back in the real world, director Danny Boyle will accompany writer James Graham and actor Jack O’Connell for a discussion of their new collaboration Ink, which tells the story of Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of British tabloid newspaper The Sun in 1969. From the documentary world, directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, with elite ski mountaineer Jim Morrison, will share stories about the making of Everest: The Other Side.

Legendary British director Mike Leigh returns to Contenders with his latest and possibly last film, Tender Loving Care. Starring Widow’s Bay Emmy winner Kate O’Flynn, who will be joining him for the event, it tells the story of a professional carer trying to get her life back on track after a breakup. Similarly, writer-director Guy Nattiv will be joined by Carrie Coon to take questions about The Liberation, their ’80s-set tale of a woman who leaves her family to join an all-female cult.

Being Heumann is the latest from Siân Heder, who last came to Contenders with her 2021 Oscar winner CODA. Joining will be the film’s star Ruth Madeley, who plays real-life American disability rights activist Judith Heumann, and casting directors Bernard Telsey and Adam Caldwell. Afterwards, Austrian writer-director Marie Kreutzer will take the stage for her drama Gentle Monster, joined by actress Léa Seydoux.

Fresh from their success at the Toronto Film Festival, “Los Javos” — the Spanish writer-director-producer team of Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi — will present their literary, multi-stranded period drama La Bola Negra with actors Miguel Bernardeau, Guitarricadelafuente, Carlos González and Penélope Cruz.

We end with two extremes; first Cruz sticks around to join Florian Zeller with their film Bunker, in which a married couple (real-life partners Cruz and Javier Bardem) hit a rock in their relationship over the husband’s commitment to building a billionaire’s safe room. Then we’re off to outer space to meet the creative team behind sci-fi spectacular Project Hail Mary: cinematographer Greig Fraser and production designer Charles Wood.

In addition, surprise guests — look out for a festival favorite that won a significant award at Cannes — are likely to be in the mix.

It’s going to be quite a day, so follow along with our panel coverage on Deadline.com and on social via #DeadlineContenders. And check back Monday when we launch the event’s streaming hub with all the panel videos.

Below is Saturday’s schedule, with order subject to change.

Contenders London 2026 Lineup

NETFLIX

Ray Gunn

Brad Bird (Writer/Director/Producer)
Michael Giacchino (Composer)

Ink

James Graham (Writer)
Danny Boyle (Director)
Jack O’Connell (Actor)

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC DOCUMENTARY FILMS

Everest: The Other Side

Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi (Director/Producer)
Jimmy Chin (Director/Producer/Director of Photography)
Jim Morrison (Elite Ski Mountaineer and Film Subject)

BLEECKER STREET / STUDIOCANAL

Tender Loving Care

Mike Leigh (Writer/Director)
Kate O’Flynn (Actor)
Marion Bailey (Actor)

The Liberation

Guy Nattiv (Writer/Director)
Carrie Coon (Actor)

LAIKA

Wildwood

Travis Knight (Director/Producer)
Caleb Deschanel (Cinematographer)
Dario Marianelli (Composer)
Deb Cook (Costume Designer)

APPLE ORIGINAL FILMS

Being Heumann

Siân Heder (Writer/Director/Producer)
Kevin Walsh (Producer)
Ruth Madeley (Actor)
Bernard Telsey (Casting Director)
Adam Caldwell (Casting Director)

NETFLIX

Gentle Monster

Marie Kreutzer (Writer/Director)
Léa Seydoux (Actor)

La Bola Negra

Javier Calvo (Writer/Director/Producer)
Javier Ambrossi (Writer/Director/Producer)
Miguel Bernardeau (Actor)
Guitarraicadelafuente (Actor)
Carlos González (Actor)
Penélope Cruz (Actor)

SONY PICTURES CLASSICS

Bunker

Florian Zeller (Writer/Director)
Penélope Cruz (Actor)

AMAZON MGM STUDIOS

Project Hail Mary

Greig Fraser (Cinematographer)
Charles Wood (Production Designer)

ALEXANDER

Ben’Imana

Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo (Writer/Director)

Danny Trejo has broken his silence amid backlash around his role in Daily Wire‘s latest controversial production, Pawn Shop.

On Friday, the Mexican-American veteran actor insisted he’s “pro-immigrant,” despite his casting in the pro-ICE film from Ben Shapiro‘s production company and Dallas Sonnier’s Bonfire Legend, which has been protested by locals in Livingston, Montana, where filming has been underway.

“Hey everyone. I want to address some social media comments about me,” he began in a statement on social media. “Make no mistake. I am a proud Mexican who has always been and will always be a supporter of my community. I am also obviously, pro immigrant. I am not pro ice. I know where I come from and I know our struggles. I am an actor. My job is to tell a story. God Bless you, Danny

Trejo added in the caption, “I am a proud Mexican who has always been and will always be a supporter of my community. I am also obviously, pro-immigrant. I am not pro-ICE.”

The actor’s statement comes after production was temporarily suspended last weekend, resuming with a revised film permit on Tuesday, requiring the crew to ensure food pantry access for locals to the Livingston Food Resource Center, and shielding the public both from the shooting of violent scenes, as well as from noise. The production also agreed to address backlash to their use of private security, ensuring there would be no policing or harassing of locals on nearby public streets.