SOUTH KOREAN director Kim Yoo-jin’s newest drama-thriller series Revenge of Others highlights a sister’s quest to learn the truth about her brother’s apparent suicide. This explosive K-drama series stars Shin Ye-eun, Lomon, Seo Ji-hoon, Chae Sang-woo, Lee Soo-min, and Jung Soo-bin.
Director Kim and the cast members recently gave theSun some behind-the-scenes details about the series during a virtual press conference. Kim claims that it took almost three years from the planning stage to complete the series. She had first considered producing an academy project, but writer Lee Hee Myung, with whom she worked on The World We Met Again, proposed her an idea of story in which a teenager is the lead character.
She felt the narrative was incredibly entertaining and that it would be different from other stories she had previously watched. She accepted the idea without hesitation since she felt so confident after listening to it. The actors took turns explaining their roles. Shin, who plays the protagonist Ok Chan-mi, said that this part was novel for her because she had always played a pretty light character in all of her prior works. Chan-mi begins her journey of revenge after the death of her twin brother.
She also said that in order to portray her character’s menacing nature, she avoided wearing any makeup other than lip colour, sunscreen, and eyebrow liner.
She continued: “As you can see from the still cut, [Chan-mi] is a student preparing to be a competitive shooter. After learning of her brother’s death, she feels a little dark and heavy. The Chan-mi I was thinking of was originally a bright, outgoing kid, but as she delved into her brother’s case, I felt like she gets stronger.”
The rising star of the K-drama acting scene, Lomon defined his character Soo-heon as a friend who works hard to support his ailing mother while still studying hard in school, doing sports, and living a hard life. Lomon also mentioned that Soo-heon is a skilled kick-boxer. Meanwhile, Seo Ji-hoon’s character Jae-bum is perhaps the most mysterious in this series.
Seo described his character as a boy who misses a year of school because of an unexplained accident that causes him to lose his memory. When he returns to school, he wants to fit in and is eager to assist Chan-mi, the new girl. However, the encounter also disturbs him. He is completely perplexed when he finds out that her situation has a strange connection with his accident.
Director Kim hopes to express through this series that “there is a common situation where the protagonist himself comes forward about the crimes that occur during the play. Teenagers are forced to step up because they don’t follow the simple common sense that if they sin, they should be punished.
“It wasn’t created to raise a social issue, but I think it will give you some thought about it.”
Fans were reassured by Kim that once you start watching this series, you won’t be able to stop. She further stated that it will be entertaining to see these young actors display their fresh charms.
The cast also spoke about the challenges they had while shooting this series. For Seo, he claimed his biggest struggle was portraying a very wealthy character, as he is not like that in real life.
Lomon said: “I think pulling off the action [scenes] was the most difficult part since in the script Soo-heon is not only strong at fighting, but also kick boxing to the point where he might be a professional.
“The training sequences took a lot of my time and work. I would go to action groups around three to four times each week, and every time I went, I would work out for three hours to get really good at what I was doing.”
Over the last few years, Lomon has steadily grown his fan base thanks to his success in his different roles. We asked him about what his fans can anticipate from him in this newest role and how it differs from all of his past performances.
He said: “I am really delighted and honoured that people all around the world are supporting me. Through this role, I had a lot of various difficulties and I could show different sides of me in terms of both acting and action scenes. I gave it a lot of consideration as to how I might present this character in three dimensions.
“Since my character experiences a wide range of emotions, I made sure to depict him in a variety of ways. I also trained extensively for the action parts since I am a very actor who’s greedy for action. I hope you stay tuned and watch the show.”
Shin talked about one of her first scenes in the series, where Chan-mi learned that her brother had passed away. She ended up at the police station sobbing and grieving. It was a very intense sequence, Shin said, and she felt under a lot of pressure to pull it off as the first scene.
She reflected: “Looking back, I believe it was extremely fortunate it was my very first scene since it kept my attention intact, and I really got to understand Chan-mi a lot.”
Shin claimed that because this the show’s themes are quite dark, the cast weren’t able to be happy all the time on set because there were so many incidents happening. However, she said there were still some scenes that were lighthearted, because all the cast members were fairly young and were also close friends.
“We had some fun too,”she added.
Revenge of Others is available to stream on Disney+ Hotstar, with two new episodes released every Wednesday.
