How ‘The WONDERfools’ director battled laughter, survived funny cast on set
MANILA, Philippines — Making a superhero action series like “The WONDERfools” is serious business, given the challenge of mounting action sequences and pressure of making everything look “spectacular” onscreen. But for director Yoo In-sik, the struggle was real for another reason.
Finishing the job also meant having to battle laughter and survive the super funny cast on set.
Laughing all the way to No. 1 on Netflix Philippines, the new K-drama is led by Park Eun-bin, with whom Yoo officially reunites following their megahit “Extraordinary Attorney Woo.”
Set in 1999 at the height of the Y2K doomsday panic, it follows a group of oddballs — or weirdos, in the eyes of their hometown Haeseong — struggling to deal with their newfound powers but eventually banding together to save their city.
Eun-bin plays Eun Chae-ni, the town’s “official train wreck.” After living for 27 years with a deadly heart condition, she suddenly gains a heart that won’t let her stay dead and the power to teleport, which is activated whenever she has heart palpitations.
Joining her are Son Gyeong-hun (Choi Dae-hoon), who is tagged as “Nightmare” for being a chronic complainer at city hall; and Kang Ro-bin (Im Seong-jae), the gentle-hearted but slightly pushover kitchen worker at Hearty House, the resto of Chae-ni’s grandmother (veteran actress Kim Hae-sook). He also happens to be Chae-ni’s only friend after she rescued him from high-school bullying.
Gyeong-hun becomes a human flypaper, with his hands and other body parts sticking to surfaces whenever he tells a lie. Ro-bin, meanwhile, acquires superhuman strength that is un-leashed every time he is insulted.
The trio gets entangled with Lee Un-jeong, played by Cha Eun-woo, a mysterious civil servant at the Haeseong City Hall Complaints Center. Unlike the three newly powered misfits, Un-jeong has already mastered his telekinetic abilities but has spent his life trying to live under the radar. Fortunately or unfortunately for him, Chae-ni, Gyeong-hun and Ro-bin witness him using his powers and start following him around, declaring him as their “Master.”
The way director Yoo tells this superhero action-comedy-romance is that “The WONDERfools” isn’t about the cape-ready kind of hero. It’s about people who stumble, panic, bicker, cower but somehow still end up doing something bigger than themselves.
Looking back on the director’s filmography, there appears to be a pattern of unlikely heroes and heroines at the center of his storytelling. Besides “Extraordinary Attorney Woo” (2022), he previously directed the hit medical series “Dr. Romantic” (2016 to 2023) and the action-thriller “Vagabond” (2019), among others.
When asked by The STAR during an exclusive virtual chat about his attraction to such characters, he said, “Usually, I think for a lot of the mainstream media or mainstream stories, the main character or lead character has a very clear purpose.
“For example, you see the character and you know they wanna do great things. They wanna build the hospital, they wanna become the president, and so when you are first introduced to these characters, they declare what it is that they wish to achieve.
“And then the rest of the journey is the viewers wondering about whether this person is going to make that dream come true or not.”
But the heroes of “The WONDERfools” and some of his past projects differ in that “in a lot of the cases, they don’t really know what they want,” he continued. “And when they are handed a mission, they are the type of people who ask themselves why me or what kind of qualities do I have that allows me to achieve this?”
According to him, it is this vulnerability and self-doubt that bring them closer to real people.
“And I think compared to, I would say, more common or ordinary storylines, these characters are more vulnerable, and it’s what makes them close to the people that we need in our daily lives. And I think a story about people who seem ordinary finding their true value is what I can call a true hero story.”
But of course, every true hero story needs trouble, and in “The WONDERfools,” that trouble comes in the form of the mysterious Wunderkinder Project and the dangerous figures that emerged from it.
Leading them is Ha Won-do (Son Hyun-joo), a specialist in cellular regeneration. Once the chief director of the classified Wunderkinder Project, which experimented on children’s supernatural abilities, he returns years later to the underground laboratory in Haeseong, where he secretly carries out another project with three Wunderkinder “alums.”
This Wunderkinder trio brings a darker and more dangerous set of abilities into the story. Seok Ju-ran (played by Jeong E-suh) has the power to manipulate minds and brainwash anyone she chooses. Seok Ho-ran (Choi Yoon-ji) can induce hallucinations, showing people either their deepest desires or paralyzing them with their worst fears. Kim Pal-ho (Bae Na-ra), the group’s relentless heavy hitter, can control gravity and crush anything that gets in his way. They call Dr. Ha Won-do “Father” and begin threatening Haeseong to carry out his ultimate goal.
Definitely, “The WONDERfools” has all the hallmarks of a superhero show — from villains, secret experiments, strange powers to looming danger. Yoo, nevertheless, said he was also careful to protect the series’ distinct personality.
“On top of the genre-specific thrills and audiovisual spectacle, I wanted to preserve the unique charm and vibe that only this story could offer,” he said in the separate press notes.
He also pointed to “the unpredictable twists and surprising emotional depth of the story” as the show’s greatest strength, with the series showing what happens when unlikely people rise up to the challenge and become courageous.
Asked about the biggest challenges of bringing all those elements together — action, comedy and, yes, heart — in one epic package, he noted that today’s audiences are not easily wowed by spectacle alone, especially in an era when viewers have already seen so many big-budget effects and technically impressive sequences.
“I think we live in a time when we can no longer surprise the audience with technology and technical aspects. Because no matter how fancy or how incredibly spectacular a scene may be, you just can’t surprise people with the sheer spectacle of it all,” he said.
According to Yoo, the challenge was more about ensuring the actors’ reactions felt believable.
“In order for the audiences to be surprised, the actors have to respond and react in a way that’s very real as (if) they are experiencing that sequence.”
He, however, conceded that the “spectacle” in “The WONDERfools” was likely the biggest he had ever worked on in his career.
“It’s probably the greatest in scale out of everything I’ve done, but I had to create a set on which the actors were able to respond to it as realistically as possible,” he reiterated.
“So whether it’s me explaining the situation to them or sometimes I need to bring in the physical aspects of it, for example, like wind or lighting or sometimes fireworks so that the actors can respond to it. And of course, it has to be done in a very safe manner. So I would say that was the biggest challenge.”
Beyond that, as mentioned earlier in this article, Yoo still found himself facing another tough challenge, or rather, a happy problem: He had a cast that was just too funny to handle.
“Another challenge was because of these incredibly funny comedians that we have in our actor ensemble,” the director was happy to note.
“I had to try my best not to laugh so I didn’t end up messing up the audio.”
“The WONDERfools” is now streaming on Netflix, currently claiming the No. 1 spot among most-watched series titles.
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