Son Ye-jin on playing desire in Netflix's Scandal: 'I think I've reached the age to express these emotions'

Son Ye-jin said she felt the role had found her at the right moment. "I thought to myself: haven't I now reached the age where I can express these kinds of emotions?" she told reporters at the Seoul press conference for Netflix's Scandal on the 9th. It was a candid framing for a project built on the premise that desire itself was a transgression in Joseon society.

The series premieres on the 18th and is directed by Jung Ji-woo, known for Happy End (1999), A Muse (2012), and My Love, My Bride (2014). It draws from the same source material as the 2003 Korean film Scandal: Joseon's Forbidden Love, which starred Bae Yong-joon, Jeon Do-yeon, and Lee Mi-sook and drew 3.52 million admissions despite an adults-only rating. Both the film and the new series ultimately trace back to Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's 1782 novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses, reset from pre-revolutionary French aristocracy into the rigid hierarchies of late Joseon.

A story rewritten from scratch

Jung was direct about the distance between the two Korean adaptations. "The idea of transposing the French original into late Joseon was a magnificent piece of thinking, and I have great respect for it," he said. "But I've rewritten the characters and their relationships from the ground up. The relationship between Lady Jo and Hee-yeon, in particular, doesn't exist in the original novel at all. Viewers familiar with the film will feel how much has changed."

The series centers on three figures caught in a dangerous wager. Lady Jo (Son Ye-jin) is a talented yangban woman who, despite her gifts, has been forced to live without a name of her own. She proposes a covert game of seduction to Jo-won (Ji Chang-wook), a celebrated scholar and the era's most notorious libertine, with whom she shares a bond going back to childhood. Drawn into the stakes of their game is Hee-yeon (Nana), a young widow who lost her husband before the marriage was even consummated and has since been confined by the demands of virtue.

Son Ye-jin takes over the role Lee Mi-sook played in the 2003 film, while Ji Chang-wook and Nana step into the characters originated by Bae Yong-joon and Jeon Do-yeon. Ji Chang-wook acknowledged the weight of that lineage plainly: "The film left a deep impression on me, and I couldn't help thinking of my seniors' performances. But the character I'm playing is different, and imitation wasn't an option. I worked through a lot of conversations with the director to build my own version of Jo-won."

Nana, whose Hee-yeon begins the story withdrawn and closed off from the world, said the role drew on something personal. "The character resembles who I was as a child: passive, wary of people, frightened of the world, leaning on my parents. My personality has changed since then, but I tried to go back to that version of myself and express her honestly and transparently."

What the series is adding

Son Ye-jin pointed to the serial format as the chief structural difference. In a two-hour film, each character necessarily gets compressed; across episodes, Lady Jo's interior life has space to develop in ways the original couldn't afford. "Each character's backstory is far more present," she said. "In that sense, it's a format a performer can be greedy about." She also noted that younger viewers may come to it without any prior reference point: the 2003 film is old enough that a meaningful portion of the current streaming audience has simply never seen it.

Describing the process of building Lady Jo, Son Ye-jin reached for a textile metaphor. "There are characters you play where you're sewing quickly at a machine. Lady Jo was the kind of character you have to finish stitch by stitch, with the precision of a master craftsperson. I worked through it with the director like a series of assignments, one detail at a time."

The show's visual and sonic design leans into Korean traditional culture. Pansori, the Korean narrative singing tradition, frames both the opening and the closing of the series, while personal letters and minhwa folk paintings serve as windows into the characters' inner states throughout. Jung said he hoped global viewers would come away with a new sense of what hanbok can be. "When you look at them casually they may not seem so different, but I believe you'll see hanbok here that is completely unlike what you've seen before. It's a genuine opportunity to show that beauty to a global audience."

On the question of whether the new series would match the original film's frank treatment of desire, Jung offered a single line: "You can look forward to it."

Scandal begins streaming on Netflix on the 18th.