Cho Yi-hyun

Biography

Choi Nam-ra in All of Us Are Dead begins as a school president who has difficulty connecting with her classmates. Cho Yi-hyun makes her reserve convincing long before the zombie outbreak changes everyone’s social position. As the class tries to survive, Nam-ra’s disciplined control becomes both an asset and a source of painful distance from the people beginning to matter to her. It is a performance that turns a familiar school-horror type into someone memorable.

Cho entered television through smaller roles in dramas such as Witch’s Court, Less than Evil and My Country: The New Age. Hospital Playlist gave her recurring visibility as medical student Jang Yun-bok, who works alongside her twin brother and gradually learns the emotional demands of hospital training. The role is lighter than Nam-ra, but it makes use of Cho’s attentive reactions and straightforward delivery. School 2021 placed her in a youth-drama lead as Jin Ji-won, a student making difficult decisions about education, work and what a meaningful future might look like outside conventional expectations.

All of Us Are Dead (2022) became her global breakthrough. Nam-ra’s changing condition gives Cho unusually complicated scenes of loyalty, fear and self-control. The drama’s success placed her among the younger actresses associated with a new wave of internationally watched Korean genre shows. The Matchmakers (2023) then offered a historical romantic comedy as Jung Soon-deok, a widow who secretly pursues work arranging marriages. Here Cho’s timing is livelier and more openly playful, revealing an actress not restricted to watchful, emotionally guarded teenagers.

The Matchmakers and Head Over Heels show how her comic technique has developed alongside the supernatural work. The historical matchmaker hides professional activity in a society full of rules about widows, whereas Seong-ah’s secret concerns spiritual abilities and fate. Cho is effective at portraying a girl with private knowledge that the people around her cannot easily comprehend.

Head Over Heels (2025) brought her another supernatural romantic assignment as Park Seong-ah, a student with shamanic abilities trying to change a boy’s predicted fate. The drama combines adolescent awkwardness with spiritual rules, making it a useful companion to the larger-scale supernatural crisis of All of Us Are Dead. Cho’s career is still young, but its direction is clear. She moves confidently between ensemble learning environments, tense survival stories and high-concept romances. Rather than relying on a fixed screen persona, she adapts how much emotion a character is allowed to reveal within each story’s rules.