Why Park Eun Bin doesn’t want you to root for her character in Disney+ series ‘Hyper Knife’

Park Eun Bin, known for her warm and lovable portrayal of a lawyer on the autism spectrum in “Extraordinary Attorney Woo,” takes on a starkly different challenge and a darker role in “Hyper Knife,” a medical thriller now streaming on Disney+.

This time around though, the South Korean star doesn’t want audiences to root for her character, Jeong Seok, a genius neurosurgeon with a fractured moral compass.

“This character is very anti-social. There’s a genre called picaresque, wherein the bad guy is actually the protagonist of the show. So she’s not just a villain in the show, but she uses that anti-social nature of hers as motivation to develop her character,” the South Korean star said through an English interpreter during a virtual presscon for the show.

“So it might be difficult for you to relate to her, but at the end of the show, you might feel like, ‘Okay, there might be a person like this.’ That’s the level of how I want to persuade the viewers about my character.

“I don’t want you to root for her, I don’t want you to fully understand her and relate to her, because she’s a psychopath. But I just want you to know that there could be people like this in the world. Those are food for thought, I guess, and I want you to join me on this ride of hers with all those emotional rollercoasters,” she candidly added.

As mentioned earlier, Jeong Seok is a brilliant but anti-social neurosurgeon but she is forced to operate in the shadows after being stripped of her medical license.

“I think that once I met my character, everything got a lot more fierce and intense. I think just the right word, with everything, is fierce,” she said. “I had to be fierce and tenacious with everything that I did.”

She was immediately drawn to the character when she first read the script. “When I was shooting this other show, ‘Castaway Diva,’ I got the script, and I was reading the first page, and it had such an intense log line — neurosurgeon character — and just reading about the character hooked me right away. I was drawn to it almost instantly.

“I’m not the type of person who takes on huge leaps or huge challenges. I’ve been saying this all along, but I don’t think people believe me. But I really am someone like that,” she continued.

“I’m just someone who is drawn to projects that I feel I can do a good job in. I don’t think it was a difficult choice that I had to make. ‘Hyper Knife,’ just like my other projects, I went into it thinking: What can I bring? And how can I entertain the audience through what I can showcase in this series?”

For Eun Bin, it was also an opportunity to step into another world.

“When you meet a character, it’s like you step into a new life. So it’s almost instinctive for me. I just like to expose all of my five senses to the circumstances and the story my character finds itself in. Along the way, I get to find new sides of myself as I take on the character,” she said.

For director Kim Jung Hyun (“After the Rain,” “My Fellow Citizens”), on the other hand, casting Eun Bin in such an uncharacteristic role proved exciting.

“I think it’s the same with all directors — we always want to pull out a new facet of an actor. With ‘Hyper Knife,’ I think I went to a very drastic length because this is a role we don’t usually expect from Eun Bin,” he said.

The K-drama star is joined by co-actors Yoon Chan Young, Sol Kyung Gu and Park Byeong Eun during the presscon for the series.

Photos courtesy of Disney+

“And I had a lot of high expectations of Eun Bin — I knew she would pull this off so well and just nail this character.

“On set, I would monitor her performing and just say to myself, wow, she’s crazy. She was doing so well. So I almost wondered if she went a little cuckoo because she just did so well.

“The first two episodes — that’s not everything. She would have this culmination of her emotions, and she would explode in later episodes.

“I felt like crying because she did so well, and it was so impactful,” the director reiterated.

Eun Bin also stars alongside Sul Kyung Gu (“Memoir of a Murderer,” “Oasis”), who plays her former mentor, Choi Deok Hee. Their complex relationship is expected to drive much of the drama in “Hyper Knife.”

“That chemistry between us two was just immaculate,” said Kyung Gu. “There are things where Eun Bin is quite hard on me — Eun Bin would not feel that dopamine rush, but me, I would feel the dopamine rush when she’s being hard on me. I would do things to her, and she would do bad things to me, too.

“But I think what’s really exciting and fun about this narrative is that they are in a mentor-mentee relationship. She used to look up to me and now harbors resentment towards me.

“As for me (in the show), I never liked any of my pupils — she’s the only one that I really admired and respected, and we clashed with each other. It’s a very three-dimensional relationship that we have, and it changes and evolves. From admiration, it goes to hatred, but it’s not as simple as that — there are so many emotions within that entire scope.”

Eun Bin expressed her gratitude for working with the veteran actor, saying, “We didn’t need words. Other than my performance, I just really wanted to enjoy the time I got to spend with him. I had a lot of conversations with him, and he was so caring of me and told me a lot of advice. If not for him, I wouldn’t have finished performing my character in the show. I relied on him so much.

“Because of him, my character became a cuckoo girl,” she quipped.

Interestingly, playing a neurosurgeon didn’t only allow Eun Bin a deep dive into the world of medicine, but also an opportunity to somehow revisit her college degree, which is Psychology.

“I don’t rely on a lot of text and books in trying to understand a character. It was also the case with Attorney Woo on the spectrum. No matter what character it is, I try to focus on the characteristics and there are some things that I am more familiar with because I majored in Psychology in college,” she said of her preparation for the project.

“I also looked at certain professional tests for personality categories. It’s very hard for me to talk about these matters, but I try to do that and fall back on my Psychology major as well.”

One thing is certain, she enjoyed playing a neurosurgeon.

“I really loved it! I’m also curious about the human brain. You can never see a human brain unless you’re a neurosurgeon, right? So this time around, there were models of the human brain that were really true to life, and you’d spend hours just looking into it through the microscope,” she explained.

“I thought, wow, this is the brain that I have inside my own skull, and it was so fascinating to see that — the model of the human brain. Just a little part of that would lead to big changes in people’s personalities, and you could save people — I could vicariously live through those moments.”

Meanwhile, despite the expectations and pressure of bringing in the viewing numbers for Disney+, the fan-favorite K-drama female lead remains focused on the heart of the project.

“I think when you go looking into new projects, I don’t think about how well it will do first. The production period was quite long, so there were so many hands on this project (including crew and staff),” Eun Bin said.

“When a launch of a new show is coming up, you go back to those memories on set and all those production dates. And just… knowing we poured our hearts and souls into it, not just me, but everybody who worked on it, I just really hope if you press click, you will stay with us until the very end.”

(With two episodes released every Wednesday until April 9, “Hyper Knife” is now streaming exclusively on Disney+.)