Star
Film ingenue Kim Tae-ri cast opposite Lee Byung-heon for Mr. Sunshine
Jul 06, 2017
Interesting choice! The lead actress for
star writer Kim Eun-sook’s (The Lonely Shining Goblin, Descended From the Sun)
much-anticipated upcoming drama, Mr. Sunshine, has been cast, and it’s a rising
film actress making her drama debut, Kim Tae-ri. She’ll be joining longtime
industry veteran Lee Byung-heon (Inside Men), giving this TV drama a boost of
Chungmuro starpower.
Kim Tae-ri’s acting debut came in the 2015
film Moon Young so she’s very much still a rookie, but she put in an impressive
performance in Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden last year, for which she won new
actress awards at both the Blue Dragons and the Buil Film Awards. It was very
much a star-making turn—I thought she was remarkable as the handmaiden, who
provided the eyes through which we entered the bizarre and mysterious world of
that movie. And upon further thought, the casting makes sense in that it seems
to echo the dynamic that made Goblin such a success, pairing a promising film
rookie opposite a familiar leading man with oodles of screen presence.
Mr. Sunshine is set in the late years of
the Joseon dynasty in the early 1900s, during the time when Japan was
aggressively asserting dominance over its neighbors, particularly Korea (which
it annexed in 1910). The human melodrama tells the story of “the righteous army
that went unrecorded in history but which must be remembered.” Lee Byung-heon
plays one such soldier, who as a child was taken to the United States following
the Shinmiyangyo incident of 1871, in which an American expedition turned into
armed conflict, resulting in over 200 Korean deaths. He returns as an American
soldier to “the country that abandoned him” when he’s stationed in Joseon, and
there he meets a young aristocratic lady.
Kim Tae-ri will play the last in the
lineage of the prominent aristocratic Go family, which was one of the pillars
of the Joseon nation. Kim played a lowly servant who fell in love with the
aristocrat’s daughter in The Handmaiden, so it’s fitting that she’ll get to
turn the tables and be the aristocrat’s daughter for Mr. Sunshine. (Ironically,
her character in this drama is called simply “Aegisshi,” a term referring to a
noble young lady that’s a variant of “agasshi,” which is The Handmaiden’s
Korean title.)
Sounds ambitious and potentially epic. I
have to say I have my reservations about Lee Byung-heon (I think he’s a
powerhouse actor but his personal stuff icks me out), but I don’t know if I can
stay away from this fighting-for-freedom-against-colonial-overlords storyline,
especially since Kim Eun-sook is probably going to rip our hearts out, reduce
us to sobs, and make us like it. Mr. Sunshine is being planned for an early
2018 launch. Source-http://www.dramabeans.com/2017/07/film-ingenue-kim-tae-ri-cast-opposite-lee-byung-heon-for-mr-sunshine/