Im Siwan Plays a Murder Suspect Heir in tvN's My Guilty Man, Premiering the 19th

Seol In-ah plays a special-forces-trained detective who disguises herself as a man to take a job as personal secretary to Im Siwan's character, a chaebol heir who is the prime suspect in a murder case. That is the setup of tvN's new Monday-Tuesday drama My Guilty Man (working English title; the Korean title is 나의 유죄인간), which premieres on the 19th at 8:50 p.m. KST.

The pairing fits a pattern tvN has leaned on for years: a romance built on a hidden identity, wrapped in a genre plot. Here the genre is crime. Im Siwan plays Yoon Yi-jun, the leading successor at Taegang Group, and Seol In-ah plays Kang Jae-hee, a detective who cannot stand injustice and takes the secretary post, which is open only to men, to find decisive evidence against him. Global viewers can watch on Amazon Prime Video.

Im Siwan arrives with some momentum. He made a strong impression in Netflix's Squid Game season 2, and this is his return to drama. Seol In-ah, for her part, drew notice for Mr. Queen, which reached a peak rating of 17.4%.

Seol In-ah on playing two faces

Seol In-ah said the script read quickly when she first picked it up. The draw, she said, was the chance to show action and delicate emotional acting in one role: a detective who also infiltrates as a male secretary.

Asked which of the two faces she prefers, she chose the detective. In her view, every action Kang Jae-hee takes starts from a belief in uncovering the truth of the case. For the male disguise, she said she did not approach it as "playing a man." She built it around a different question: what would Kang Jae-hee look like if she were disguising herself as one?

The physical side took the most work. Because the character is ex-special forces, Seol In-ah said her movements had to look like those of someone trained for years, so she kept up action training and conditioning throughout. She also studied how trained people walk, where they carry their weight, how they sit, what they do with their hands and how they scan a room, and watched related videos to refine it.

Two actors, two one-word definitions

The leads were each asked to sum up the central relationship in a single word. Im Siwan chose "purity." He acknowledged it may sound odd, since on paper the two can never be together: a murder suspect from a chaebol family and the detective pursuing him. Even so, he said, their pure feelings eventually create a common ground of love that lets them stay side by side.

Seol In-ah's phrase was "from suspicion to trust." The two begin unable to believe each other, she said, but come to understand and trust each other through the cases they go through together. She added "reversal" as the couple's signature, noting that familiar romance roles flip in several scenes: Kang Jae-hee sometimes protects Yoon Yi-jun and throws herself into physical scenes more actively than he does. That unexpected chemistry, she said, is the couple's appeal.

The drama also follows a second pair. Kim Si-hyun (Kim Jung-hyun), a lawyer on Taegang Group's legal team, and Lee Hye-jung (Yeonwoo), the chairman's secretary, develop their own romance in parallel.