Ji Chang-wook Stands by Netflix's Scandal Despite Mixed Reviews: 'Not the Wrong Choice'

"My work receiving negative reviews is sad and frustrating," Ji Chang-wook said at a café in Seoul's Jongno district on the 22nd. "But it was a reaction I expected. This was a project worth attempting, and personally, I have no regrets. Even if the criticism outweighs the praise, it wasn't the wrong choice."

The 39-year-old actor was speaking about Scandal, the new Netflix series in which he plays Jo Won, Joseon's most celebrated and notorious seducer. The show is the latest adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's 1782 French novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses, transposed to the Joseon dynasty by director Jeong Ji-woo, whose filmography includes Happy End (1999) and Eungyo (2012). Released on the 18th, it drew immediate attention for its visually immersive take on traditional Korean aesthetics, hanbok, folk painting, pansori, but also drew criticism from some viewers who felt the pacing drained the story of the erotic tension that makes the source material so potent.

Ji Chang-wook was measured but honest about that divide. "I can't enjoy the negative reviews," he said. "It might become a project that fades from public memory, but I'm not ashamed of it."

The weight of comparison

Taking on the role of Jo Won was never going to be a quiet act. The same story has been adapted multiple times in Korea: most pointedly in the 2003 film Scandal: A Shocking and Wrongful Incident, which starred Bae Yong-joon, Jeon Do-yeon, and Lee Mi-sook, and the 2012 film Dangerous Liaisons with Jang Dong-gun. A 2018 MBC drama version, The Great Seducer, starred Woo Do-hwan and Red Velvet's Joy. Comparisons with those predecessors, particularly Bae Yong-joon and Jang Dong-gun, were unavoidable from the moment Ji Chang-wook's casting was announced.

"Being compared is something I can't escape," he said. "The moment you become an actor, being evaluated and compared is your fate. Who is better than whom doesn't mean much to me. I expressed my own version of Jo Won as sincerely as I could."

He had been drawn to the character precisely because he resisted easy definition. Jo Won is from a distinguished family, recognized by the king for his literary talent, and yet consumed by a longing he cannot satisfy. Ji Chang-wook set out to play him as a man in love with two women simultaneously, deliberately leaving the emotional center unresolved. "I didn't decide on the right answer before acting," he said. "Expressing Jo Won's heart in a single sentence is difficult."

A director who banned the monitor

That ambiguity was partly by design, and the method behind it was unusual. Director Jeong Ji-woo asked Ji Chang-wook not to review his own takes during filming, removing the feedback loop most actors rely on to calibrate their performance.

"It was like closing your eyes and walking while someone holds your hand," Ji Chang-wook recalled. "The director would say 'that's good' when I acted one way, and 'that's also good' when I acted differently. Eventually there were moments where I didn't know what I was expressing." He came to understand this as an intentional directorial choice: Jeong didn't want the actor to consciously judge and fix Jo Won's emotional state, preferring the character's instability to remain genuinely unresolved on screen.

"It was painful and difficult," Ji Chang-wook said, "but having a director with that kind of relentless vision was a rare and meaningful experience. I came to deeply respect him through this project."

Working opposite Son Ye-jin and Nana

The dynamic between Jo Won and the two women in his life, Jo-ssi Buin, played by Son Ye-jin, and the widowed Hee-yeon, played by Nana, is the engine the story runs on.

On working with Son Ye-jin, Ji Chang-wook allowed himself a joke. "I wasn't worried about Hyun Bin at all," he said with a grin, referring to Son's husband, the actor Hyun Bin. More seriously, he described the shoot as "breathless" and said he prepared with unusual intensity to hold his own opposite her. "Just working with a senior like her created a sense of tension. I felt that the friction between Jo-ssi Buin and Jo Won needed to be sharp and alive for the show to really work, so I was on edge trying not to lose ground."

His description of Nana was warmer but equally specific. "She has an instinctive, almost animal-like sensibility," he said. "She's a performer who wants to explore and show the most essential truth of a scene. I felt she was searching for something real, and working herself hard, and suffering a little, to find it." He added that his main goal on set with her was less about giving direction than creating the conditions for her to feel at ease: softening the atmosphere, staying present beside her during emotionally demanding takes, occasionally saying something silly to break the tension.

The nude scenes, and why he didn't overthink them

Scandal includes a number of intimate scenes, some of which required Ji Chang-wook to film near-full nudity. Asked whether he prepared his physique for those sequences, his answer was characteristically direct.

"If I had prepared to look impressive, I think I would have failed," he said. He explained that the director's conversations with him centered not on the visual of exposure but on its intention, what the scene was trying to say, not how the body looked within it. "I personally wondered whether, if my body had looked great, it would have matched the tone of this project at all." He acknowledged real nerves: "Of course there's pressure. How could there not be? But the conversations with the director gave me the courage to go forward."

He was equally clear that he didn't think about fan reactions when making the call. "Thinking about what fans would like before doing a project doesn't seem like the right mindset to me. That kind of calculation going in leads somewhere not quite right."

His next project pairs him with Jeon Ji-hyun in a fantasy romantic comedy, a sharp tonal turn from the charged psychological world of Scandal. But asked to summarize what this one meant to him, Ji Chang-wook kept it simple. "At this point in my life, attempting a role like this was something I'm grateful for. And I'm not ashamed of it."