Actor known for wholesome leads steps into her darkest role yet in new series hitting HBO Max
"I'm, like, negative 100 percent," Kim Yoo-jung said Thursday at CGV Yongsan in Seoul when asked about her sync rate with her character Baek Ah-jin. "I got so swept up playing her that I barely checked the monitor. But that's obviously not who I am."
She'd just spent the better part of the press conference explaining how she plays a top actor who, wearing a mask of perfection, crushes anyone standing in her way. This is the star of Tving's "Dear X," the upcoming 12-episode series based on a hit webtoon.
The distance might be what sells it. For someone who's built a career playing upright, feel-good characters — think "Love in the Moonlight" and "Lovers of the Red Sky" — since her days as a beloved child actor two decades ago, taking on a ruthless sociopath is an entirely different sport.
Her character Ah-jin claws her way to stardom by leaving behind a trail of broken people — the "Xs" of the title. She's got two enablers in her orbit: childhood friend Jun-seo (Kim Young-dae), who's convinced he can pull her back from the edge, and Jae-oh (Kim Do-hoon), who follows her around like a true believer.
The drama adds original material to the webtoon's four-part structure, but the core premise stays intact. It's the kind of character study that taps into anxieties about the celebrity machine — how much darkness can someone bury under the movie star glamour?
Kim explained her approach without overthinking it. "I tried not to see this as some huge challenge. If I'd thought about the pressure, I would've tensed up." She turned to the source material; the webtoon's static format actually helped capture the character's essence. "The images are frozen, so you get these unreadable expressions. I focused on stripping things away, lots of scenes where it plays through the eyes. You're supposed to feel that mystery."
Director Lee Eung-bok, a veteran whose credits include "Sweet Home" and "Mr. Sunshine," framed the project in mythic terms.
"When I read the webtoon, the first thing that hit me was this angel-and-demon theme. A devil with an angel's face born under a terrible fate, and the two guardian angels trying to protect her."
The bleakness of the material pushes hard. Early episodes screened for reporters showed plenty of abuse and violence — Ah-jin's rise leaves bodies in her wake, metaphorically and sometimes literally. The series' picaresque format renders everyone complicit without offering clear heroes or redemptive arcs. Who's there to root for when the lead's a sociopath and the men who love her either enable her worst impulses or delude themselves into thinking they can fix her?
Kim had a direct answer to offer: "I don't want people rooting for her by default. But since she's the lead, I wanted viewers pulled into her perspective," she said.
"Everyone has different faces, different versions of themselves. There are countless other versions of me that exist inside," she added. "But to get along in the world, we present the good parts when we interact with people. When I thought about it that way, this self wasn't so unfamiliar to me."
The director characterized the show's brutal opening episodes as a kind of threshold. "I think of the whole thing as a dark fairy tale. Ah-jin has to hit the absolute end of cruelty before she breaks into the entertainment world. That brutal stretch is the door she walks through."
His bet is on shifting perspectives and complicating how the viewers see Ah-jin. "People around her view her in all kinds of ways, not just as a villain. It depends on whose vantage point you're watching from."
Then there's the matter of scale, and the stakes that come with it. "Dear X" is Tving's first series to stream globally via HBO Max, and is slated to roll out across 17 locations under a partnership deal between CJ ENM and Warner Bros.
"We'd already finished everything when the deal happened," Lee said. Still, the director sees potential in the material. "The performances our cast pulled off — these are pretty universal stories about power and relationships."
Kim came back to what resonates across cultures. "This is great news for fans who couldn't access Tving content before. But after all, the series deals with human relationships, the complicated feelings people go through."
"It's about morality, right? Who gets to throw stones at whom? That stuff translates. I hope people watch it from that angle, not just for the shock value."
Dear X premieres Nov. 6 on Tving and HBO Max with four episodes, then drops two episodes weekly through December.
moonkihoon@heraldcorp.com
