Eom Jung-hwa Is Back: 'OK Madam 2' Director Wants This Female Action Series to Run Four Films

Six years ago, OK Madam opened in Korean theaters and almost immediately lost its audience to a pandemic-era shutdown. On August 12, director Lee Cheol-ha gets his second shot, and this time, he says, the film is twice the size.

"It's like déjà vu," Lee told reporters at a Seoul café on August 10, noting that OK Madam 2 opens on the exact same calendar date as the original. "The same thing repeating on the same day feels strange, but also gives me courage."

The OK Madam series follows Mi-young (played by Eom Jung-hwa), a former North Korean secret agent turned street-food vendor who keeps getting pulled back into danger no matter how hard she tries for a quiet life. In the first film, a hijacked plane was the battleground. In the sequel, it's a working cruise ship, one the production actually filmed aboard, giving the action sequences a scale the original couldn't match.

Eom Jung-hwa, irreplaceable

Lee was effusive about his lead. "Who besides Eom Jung-hwa could play Mi-young?" he said. "She's warm and approachable, but she can also be fierce and powerful, there's no other actor who can hold both of those at the same time." He went further: "Eom Jung-hwa is Mi-young. I want to keep making this series with her through parts three and four."

For longtime fans of Eom, who has balanced pop stardom and acting across three decades, the role feels like a natural fit. Mi-young's combination of domestic warmth and explosive physicality plays to exactly the kind of range Eom has spent years building.

Sooyoung steps into villain territory

The sequel's most talked-about addition is Girls' Generation's Choi Sooyoung, who makes her action-film debut as the villain Anya. Lee says she was his first and only casting choice from the moment the character existed on paper.

"I was imagining a female villain who is cool but also mischievous, almost childlike," he said. "I thought only Sooyoung could do this. From the very first meeting, she understood exactly what I was going for." The result, by his description, is a character with a breezy surface that conceals something genuinely unsettling, a balance Sooyoung apparently nailed without a warmup period.

The blueprint: Hong Kong action with Korean heart

Lee traces the series back to the Yes, Madam films of the 1980s and 90s, the Hong Kong action franchise built around Michelle Yeoh (then credited as Yang Tsi-ching). Those films were his model for what a Korean female action franchise could look like, but he wanted to layer in something distinctly local.

"There were no female-led action films in Korea, and that was the problem I was trying to solve," he said. "I took the Yes, Madam series as my template and added family love and humanity on top of it."

The emotional center of OK Madam has always been the relationships: mother and daughter, husband and wife, the ordinary life Mi-young is fighting to protect. That domestic core, wrapped in physical action that nods to classic Hong Kong choreography, is what Lee calls the franchise's "winning move", a way to pull Korean audiences in through recognition as much as spectacle.

OK Madam 2 opens in Korean theaters on August 12.