Kim Yoo-jung's New tvN Drama Hits 1.59M Teaser Views Before It Even Airs

A teaser alone has pulled 1.59 million views, and 100 Days of Lies hasn't even aired yet. tvN's upcoming Saturday-Sunday drama premieres on October 10, and the anticipation building around its lead pairing is the clearest signal yet that the network's 20th-anniversary special has landed on something people genuinely want to watch.

The show is set in Gyeongseong (colonial-era Seoul) and follows two characters locked in an elaborate double game: Lee Ga-gyeong, the city's most skilled pickpocket turned undercover operative, and Kim Tae-woong, an elite interpreter working inside the Japanese Government-General. Over 100 days, their cover identities collide and slowly unravel. The writers have built the central tension around interpretation itself, not just what is said, but what is hidden beneath the words, and the added layer that Lee Ga-gyeong was planted inside the Government-General by independence fighters gives the romance a sharper edge than the genre usually delivers.

What the teaser reveals

The newly released production stills show Lee Ga-gyeong (played by Kim Yoo-jung) stepping through the doors of the Government-General for the first time, her face a careful negotiation between nerves and composure. She has successfully infiltrated as a translation trainee named Geum Seo-hee, with her real name, background, and social status all buried under the fiction. The relief barely has time to settle before she comes face to face with Kim Tae-woong (Park Jin-young), who already suspects her from a string of run-ins that feel far too coincidental. A later still places them in an office together, Tae-woong absorbed in his work while Ga-gyeong watches him sideways, the kind of charged, unspeaking proximity that the show is clearly going to live in for a while.

In a separate sequence, Tae-woong is shown guiding the new trainee through the building, his manner still cold and guarded even as her character radiates something like genuine curiosity. The contrast between her open energy and his clipped suspicion is doing a lot of work early, and the question the drama is positioning at its center is whether Ga-gyeong, who slipped into espionage somewhat by accident, motivated more by personal survival than ideology, will be changed by what she finds at the heart of the enemy.

Kim Yoo-jung's sageuk track record

Kim Yoo-jung, 26, has been attached to the phrase "sageuk queen you can always trust" for most of her career, and the resume backs it up. She appeared in Queen Seondeok, Dong Yi, The Moon That Embraces the Sun, and Moonlight Drawn by Clouds, moving between historical and contemporary dramas, including Backstreet Rookie and My Demon, without ever losing the audience's confidence in her. The 2012 MBC drama The Moon That Embraces the Sun is the benchmark: it peaked at a 42.2% nationwide rating, and Kim Yoo-jung's performance as the young version of Han Ga-in's lead character was singled out as one of the main reasons the show caught fire so quickly.

On choosing this role, Kim said the script pulled her in immediately: "I remember reading it and losing all track of time. I felt the depth of the story, and it made me think a lot about the people who actually lived through that era." She described wanting to channel the will and the emotional lives of young people from that period, and to find a way to let viewers share in what she herself was curious to explore through the character.

Park Jin-young's first period role

For Park Jin-young, 100 Days of Lies is new territory. He has built a steady reputation in contemporary dramas, The Devil Judge, Yumi's Cells Season 2, and Unknown Seoul each added something to the picture, but this marks his first time working in a historical setting. His character, Kim Tae-woong, carries a dual identity: he is also Sato Hideo, adopted son of a senior Government-General official, and the drama will trace how that fractured sense of self shifts once Ga-gyeong enters his world.

Park said the script and creative team were the deciding factor: "The script, the director, the writer, everyone involved, they were the essential reason I decided to join. Just being able to work alongside them was enough." He added that he hopes audiences will watch how Tae-woong changes through his encounters with Ga-gyeong.

The two leads have been generous about each other in early interviews. Kim Yoo-jung said Park was the reason she could shape Ga-gyeong as fully as she did: "There were many points in this character that would have been very hard to reach alone, but feeling Park Jin-young's performance as Tae-woong in real time helped me so much." Park, for his part, called Kim the center of the set: "She looks out for the whole production and for every person around her. That attentiveness really shone."

The warmth between them in those comments, set against the cold-war tension their characters are supposed to sustain, is exactly the kind of gap that tends to make a period romance work. 100 Days of Lies premieres on tvN on October 10.