[Sportschosun reporter Jo Ji-young] Director Jeong Ji-woo, 58, said, "Nana's lip filler controversy—it was entirely my fault."
In an interview for the Netflix series The Scandal on the afternoon of the 28th, director Jeong Ji-woo discussed his experience working with Son Ye-jin, who plays Lady Jo, a woman with exceptional talent who proposes a dangerous wager of seduction in defiance of an age of taboos. He also spoke about Ji Chang-wook, who plays Jo Won, Joseon's greatest ladies' man, and Nana, who plays Hee-yeon, a young widow whose life changes after becoming entangled in the wager between Lady Jo and Jo Won.
Jeong Ji-woo spoke cautiously about Nana, saying, "It was all my fault. It was the director's responsibility."
He stated, "For Nana, it was a crucial moment to determine how Hee-yeon, who had been betrayed in love, should live. I thought Hee-yeon had to function as a character who says she will live on defiantly. If love had been everything to her, she would have had no strength to rise again after being betrayed. She gained strength as a character by saying she would survive and live defiantly, and that was the most important key to The Scandal."
Regarding Nana, who endured a difficult time because of the lip filler controversy, he blamed himself. "It's all my fault. I was focused on things more important than that—her lips—so I didn't realize it could become an issue. Nana and I had countless conversations and spent long hours together discussing the character's emotions. Any visual outcome that made it into the frame is entirely the director's responsibility, and that's the right way to see it," he said.
He continued, "Nana is an actor who will take on many good projects in the future. She pushes her body to the limit to portray raw emotion. She immersed herself so deeply in Hee-yeon's emotions that, as her director, there were many moments when I worried about her. Nana thought the character had to die. She said, 'How can she go on living after being betrayed in love?' But I explained that if that happened, there would be no reason to make this with the original source material. I persuaded her that the character could never die. I told her she had to survive somehow, and on one occasion, she stayed behind with me for more than three hours after all the staff had left the set following a shoot."
The Scandal tells the story of a woman with exceptional talent who is too gifted to live confined solely as a woman of the Joseon era, a brazen and dangerous wager of love between her and Joseon's greatest ladies' man, and another woman caught up in that wager. Son Ye-jin, Ji Chang-wook, and Nana star in the series. Lee Seung-young, the writer of The Art of Negotiation, and Ahn Hye-song, the writer of Somebody, wrote the screenplay, while Jeong Ji-woo, director of Eungyo, Tune in for Love, and Somebody, directed it. The series was released on Netflix on the 18th.
Reporter Jo Ji-young soulhn1220@sportschosun.com
This article has been translated by GripLabs Mingo AI.
