BOY MEETS GIRL
JANUARY 19, 2016
Last summer, a boy met a girl and her grasped her hand. She did not turn it away. A blush rose on their faces, and their hands might even have sweat. Bashful, they turned their eyes to a blinding blue sky, and dust rose as their shoes tapped along the ground. The air between them was unfamiliar, and the boy and girl were awkward. This is not the first scene of the film Unforgettable. This is an account of Do Kyungsoo’s and Kim Sohyun’s first meeting, a little embellished. At the first shooting, director Lee Eunhee directed them to hold hands without preamble, and they were not allowed to let go whether or not the cameras were rolling. The two of them were in agreement: “It was embarrassing!” That was the start for the then-twenty-three Do Kyungsoo and seventeen year old Kim Sohyun.
Unforgettable is the story of a tender first love and the close friendship of five who are in their forties during the present and seventeen in 1991. Kim Sohyun took on our first love, Suok, and Do Kyungsoo took on the quietly, single-mindedly devoted Beomsil. What brings back the past is a letter that arrives during a radio broadcast — a premise that is both familiar and yet, not. Perhaps it is just an attribute of films or dramas about a first love in the past that that first love goes unrealized.
Director Lee Eunhee started her search with the actors. Rather than searching for an actor that would fit the film, she meshed the character with the actor. Do Kyungsoo and Kim Sohyun, whose smiles form hearts, were cast as Beomsil and Suok.
Neither actor hesitated. Kim Sohyun wept upon reading the scenario. Although it was from a time before she was born, she could not let it go. “My heart was thumping. It was so pretty and so sad. I thought it was really good.” Do Kyungsoo connected with Beomsil quickly. “I read the scenario without knowing anything. The first thought I had was, I wanted to try a character like Beomsil. I told them I would take it on the spot.” He wanted to relive the word innocence. “I clowned around a lot in high school, so I don’t think I really qualified for the word like how it is in the movie. I’d lost my genuineness (laughs).”
The search for his lost seventeen-year-old memories would take him to Goheung and Deukryang Island in Jeollanam-do. The island is 400 kilometers from Seoul, where one must cross the sea to reach it. It’s just a dot on the map. The mud flats and paddies are beautiful. On an island without a single supermarket, the best vendor was a food truck. The roads became home to the actors. The five peer actors came together and became friends in Jeollanam-do’s small seaside villages, like a movie or drama. “I passed the time playing around at things village boys could. I swam in the ocean and fished too. And drank, of course.” Do Kyungsoo hadn’t known how to swim but splashed around a bit every day before taking a liking to the water after learning. He had lived briefly in Goheung as a child, and recalled warm feelings for it. “What we did most was talk. There was no electricity, so it got too dark when night fell and if it rained, you couldn’t go outside. Us three guys shared a room in the village hall and we really talked a lot. Acting talk, just guy talk… I don’t think we hid anything.” They would retire at dawn. If they filmed during the day, they didn’t come back out after eating dinner, and if they filmed at night, they shot till dawn until they could go back in and talk some more. Despite the explosion of hand phones in Korea, no one walked around with a smartphone in hand. The one who led acting practices was Do Kyungsoo, while Lee David took over their leisure time. To Kim Sohyun, he was a comedy show. “There was no chance to be bored, David oppa had so much energy. Because if we put on one song, he could make it last ten hours.”
Their training had great and evident effect on their dialect. The five actors put up a ban on “Seoul speak” like they were studying language abroad. When Kim Sohyun felt a need to study, to be more native, she went to the neighborhood bathhouse and quietly listened to the gossip. “The neighborhood got news that a movie would be filming there, so they brought drinks and talked to us a lot. Although I was a little shy about being in a bathhouse, so I didn’t actively take part (laughter).” For Do Kyungsoo, who still lets slip a “mwoyeo!” in his everyday life, the aesthetic of Jeollanam-do’s dialect left him in awe. “In this scene where Sandol wears a cast, one of the residents doesn’t say to him “it must hurt” but “what a bitter sight.” Wow, that really is a way to put it. The variety of expression surprised me.”
Beomsil, Suok, Gilja, Sandol, and Gaedeok become true friends, and the give-and-take energy of their friendship went into their acting. Director Lee Eunhee gave each of them different directions, and the reactions were more natural from that separation. For a scene focusing on just the two of them, Beomsil even picked an outfit for Suok after asking what she looked nice in. In those small choices, the events were made more real to the actors and the film was filled with sincerity. Do Kyungsoo, who was in a cold sweat during the reading, and Kim Sohyun, who had many concerns about her acting in her previous project, felt less pressure with Unforgettable. Director Lee Eunhee is to be commended for her venture in having the actors realize the characters.
Long hair, large eyes, a round and small face, thin-limbed — seventeen year old Kim Sohyun has all the perfect looks to be the nation’s first love. Debuting at ten years old, she has been going from the nation’s little sister to its first love, starting with I Miss You. With I Can Hear Your Voice, The Suspicious Housekeeper, and Who Are You — School 2015, lacking was absent from Kim Sohyun’s round eyes. Kim Sohyun showed through her projects that she only let herself pass by shedding things to be cut away, instead of seeing everything in a rose-colored light. Could that be why? In Unforgettable, Suok never really followed the image of the first love. “She asked me, ‘Director, what kind of clothes do you think Suok wears?’ I answered, a flower-patterned one piece dress. She replied that she wouldn’t wear anything that brought to my mind a first love. She asked the people around the same. Suok was going to be different from the typical. Sohyun is a friend with a very strong side. She isn’t slowed by obstacles.” Kim Sohyun liked Suok’s mental strength. She also liked that it reminded her of junior high school friends, who she couldn’t meet often due to dropping out of high school to be homeschooled. Of the five friends, she was the only actor who matched her role’s age. This was her summer as a seventeen year old. “I haven’t had my first love yet. Filming this movie was the first time I’d experienced its emotions, through Suok. It’s a movie that means a lot to me.”
Unfortunately, Suok is not Do Kyungsoo’s first love. Every time he acts as Beomsil, what comes to mind is his first love in the last year of high school. “If there’s something Beomsil and I have in common, Our single-minded personality too. It wasn’t a crush then, but now I remember it sadly, maybe because my sorrow was huge when we had to break up.” The scenario’s Beomsil was slightly spoiled upon meeting Do Kyungsoo. “Beomsil was manly and innocent, but after I got in, how should I say this? A kind of foolish side? He got more spacey. Should I say he got more shy in a dense way? The director liked it (laughs).” IOIL’s writer Noh Heekyung once said as well that upon meeting the clean canvas that was Do Kyungsoo: “At the script reading, he was seriously gloomy when I told him to read his lines gloomily, so his character became a little brighter.” Although he is a member of the group EXO, wildly popular all over the world — maybe it’s because he’d never learned to act before. He approaches his characters without calculation. On set, Kim Sohyun found fresh energy watching him. “As we worked on this, Kyungsoo oppa was really liberal. He really acts with sincerity. He acts purely, with his heart, and that reached me so that I could act with my heart instead of my head too. We matched really well.”
When Do Kyungsoo first appeared in Cart, those who were not familiar with him as an EXO member picked him out as a ‘likely new actor.’ He, who had never raised his voice in his life, showed restraint in acting for the downtrodden Taeyoung. Bu Jiyoung, who had seen to his first-ever audition, felt immediately that “Yes, he’s got something.’ If you tell him to work on a feeling, he was a friend who would immediately reflect results. Acting isn’t with the head but with an instinct, and he had it.” That instinct overwhelmed him in Unforgettable. “There’s a scene where I get angry at Suok’s father. But my body went weird during the second take. My eyes went big and my body stiffened, like I was actually angry. I told the director, “Director, I’m being strange,” and I only relaxed after about ten minutes of massage.” It was likely an immersion only possible because of his love for movies from a young age. From the hurt boy in IOIL to his eerie acting in IRY, Do Kyungsoo tries to bring his character’s inner thoughts into his own heart. “My memory is really on the bad side. But I do think that unconscious emotions have helped.”
On set, Do Kyungsoo is always asking around, listening to advice, and returning with more concerns. These days, the person who he leans on the most for things that fall under acting is Jo Insung. “I always contact Insungie-hyung when there’s something difficult about a scenario, character, or even setting. He helps me find the middle ground between how I see a character, how he sees him, and how the director sees him. We have a lot in common that it feels like we can say something without speaking.”
Do Kyungsoo’s latest movie is Brother. He plays a successful judoka. If there was anything different lately because of this, it was a sturdier build. “I exercised a lot because they told me there’d be a scene with exposure. My build was small, but I feel that it’s changed too. Even still, I’m small. But the important thing about this! Is that in the end, my body won’t be revealed in the movie. It’s a little sad because I even worked hard on my abdomen, but on the other hand I think it’s for the best. It was lacking a lot. Hahaha. I have a scene with real-life judokas, and it cuts very neatly. Hahaha.”
While Do Kyungsoo was working on his shoulders, Kim Sohyun shot five projects including Unforgettable. In 2015, she acted in and sent off a two-in-one role for Who Are You, shed doubts with her new role in Page Turner, acted as a younger version of her role model Son Yejin in Princess Deokhye, and was even in the genrebusting web-drama Nightmare Teacher. “Every time I take on a new project, I try to distinguish exactly where I did well and where I didn’t. And better myself in each part I didn’t.” She reveals a time where on set where she was scolded by a director and how she hasn’t forgotten what a huge help it had been. At the end of last year, as a two-year veteran MC of the program Show! Music Core, she progressed onto the acting award ceremonies. “If they just want me back! Then I will do my best. Heheh.”
Like the last day of summer vacation, filming came to an end after three months. Do Kyungsoo returned to Seoul and the world’s busiest idol group EXO, while Kim Sohyun is absorbed in a new project. In love and friendship, we grow. Not everyone has the chance to know then what we know now. Our clumsy pasts propel our futures, to take one step more. The two actors, who had been interviewed separately, had amazingly similar thoughts on their future. “To be someone admirable to others.” What remains in the boy and the girl of that last azure and rosy summer?
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