SEOUL - Negative 100 per cent - that is what South Korean actress Kim Yoo-jung said at CGV Yongsan in Seoul on Oct 30 when asked about her sync rate with her latest 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."
Kim, 26, had just spent the better part of the press conference explaining how she plays a top actress who, wearing a mask of perfection, crushes anyone standing in her way in the new K-drama Dear X. Based on a hit webtoon of the same title, the thriller series premieres on HBO Max on Nov 6.
The distance might be what sells it. For someone who has built a career playing upright, feel-good characters - think Love In The Moonlight (2016) and Lovers Of The Red Sky (2021) -- since her days as a beloved child actress two decades ago, taking on a ruthless sociopath is an entirely different sport.
Ah-jin claws her way to stardom by leaving behind a trail of broken people - the "Xs" of the title. She has two enablers in her orbit: childhood friend Jun-seo (Kim Young-dae), who is convinced he can pull her back from the edge, and Jae-oh (Kim Do-hoon), who follows her around like a true believer.
Dear X adds original material to the webtoon's four-part structure, but the core premise stays intact. It is the kind of character study that taps 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 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 (2020 to 2024) and Mr Sunshine (2018), framed the project in mythic terms. He said: "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 is 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.
"Everyone has different faces, different versions of themselves... 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 characterised 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 is the matter of scale, and the stakes that come with it. Dear X is South Korean subscription streaming television service Tving's first series to stream globally via HBO Max, and is slated to roll out across 17 locations under a partnership deal between South Korean entertainment and mass media company CJ ENM and American media corporation Warner Bros.
"We'd already finished everything when the deal happened," Lee, who is in his early 50s, said. Still, he 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." THE KOREA HERALD/ASIA NEWS NETWORK