Im Siwan Wore More Costumes in One tvN Drama Than in His Whole Career

Im Siwan says the costume count on tvN's My Guilty Man exceeds that of every project he has done before it combined. "Since I was playing a chaebol, I filmed in the most comfortable conditions of any work I've done," he said at the drama's online press conference on the 14th, adding that the number of outfits was overwhelming compared with his earlier work.

The line also points to a shift in his career. Known for playing young people in hard circumstances in The Attorney (2013), Misaeng (2014) and Strangers from Hell (2019), he now plays the likely next heir of South Korea's top-ranked conglomerate. The Monday-Tuesday drama premieres on the 19th at 8:50 p.m., and director Park Dan-hee, Seol In-ah, Kim Jung-hyun and Yeonwoo joined him at the event.

A suspect and a detective in disguise

The series is adapted from the Kakao Page web novel Why Don't You Know She's a Woman? and blends romance, thriller and comedy. Im plays Yoon Yi-joon, an executive director at the fictional Taegang Group and its probable successor. He becomes the prime suspect in a murder after his aide is found dead in a cabinet.

Seol In-ah plays Kang Jae-hee, a police detective and former Army special warfare noncommissioned officer. She goes undercover as Yoon's personal aide, dressed as a man, to find the real culprit. The role is written as a martial-arts expert, and Seol said she focused on looking like someone already conditioned rather than on trying to perform the action well.

Park praised her work on set. After rehearsing with the martial arts director, the team changed a move on the assumption she could not do it, and she then did it herself and changed it back. "I've never seen an actor better at action than the action team," the director said. He also said Seol once went to the emergency room after an injury during filming, then returned within an hour and finished the day's shoot.

Costumes as a way to show emptiness

Im described Yoon as a "fierce, sharp-clawed cat": prickly and sensitive, but shaped by a life of doing only what was expected of him. He said he wanted to avoid the usual chaebol image and looked closely at the character's past, which he read as a fate in which what he must do outranks what he wants. The flashy styling is deliberate. "Usually the lonelier someone is, the more they dress themselves up," he said, comparing it to a peacock spreading its feathers, with the clothes meant to make the character's inner emptiness more visible.

Yoon's home works in a similar way. Park said the indoor garden and individual rooms symbolize his state of mind, a showy but secretive space, and that his heart opens one room at a time once Jae-hee enters it.

Romance or bromance

The cross-dressing detective is a familiar device in Korean romantic comedies. Yoon Eun-hye in Coffee Prince (2007), Moon Geun-young in Painter of the Wind (2008), Park Shin-hye in You're Beautiful (2009), Park Min-young in Sungkyunkwan Scandal (2010) and Kim Yoo-jung in Love in the Moonlight (2016) all used it. Seol joins that line, though here the premise is flipped: the woman protects the man.

Seol said cutting her hair felt unfamiliar and at first brought some low moods, but that she stopped attaching meaning to it as she settled into the role. "I got to see a side of myself I hadn't seen," she said. Im recalled the moment she first appeared on set: "She had only cut her hair, but it felt like Kang Jae-hee was already walking in."

The central question is how Yoon reads his feelings. He believes his aide is a man yet grows attached, and Seol said he is confused about whether he likes Jae-hee the woman or the aide the man. She hopes viewers will lean toward reading it as romance. Im said this is his first serious approach to bromance, and joked that it reminded him of Sol Kyung-gu, who played a character devoted to him in the film The Merciless (2017).

Kim plays Yoon's friend of 16 years and a Taegang legal team lawyer, and Yeonwoo plays the chairman's aide. Park described their pairing as a masked, tense adult romance, in contrast to the leads' story of mutual rescue. The cast also went through repeated script readings over three months, which Park said were so many he wondered if it was too much, and which he credits for their chemistry.