Mainstream Popularity
After starring with close friend Shin Min-ah in the 2009 indie Sisters on the Road, Gong played an aspiring chef in romantic comedy series Pasta in 2010. Originally written as the usual brash and spunky rom-com heroine, Gong thought it would be boring and cliched to play her as such, and instead made the significant acting decision to play against type by creating the character as an ordinary girl who was seemingly meek, but had a quiet strength and slyly got her way. Her chemistry with co-star Lee Sun-kyun, and the drama's breezy atmosphere propelled it to the top of the ratings chart.
Defying easy categorization into the actress dichotomies of innocent (Choi Ji-woo, Song Hye-kyo) or sexy (Kim Hye-soo, Uhm Jung-hwa), Gong belonged to a third, very minor group of eccentrics that also include Kang Hye-jung and Bae Doona. Though not a typical beauty, after Pasta the press gave her the label Gongvely, a portmanteau of her surname and the English word "lovely."
In an emerging pattern of alternating mainstream TV series with riskier big-screen projects, Gong starred in Rolling Home with a Bull, another low-budget indie adapted from Kim Do-yeon's novel. She played a widow traveling with her poet ex-boyfriend in Im Soon-rye's part-Buddhist meditation, part-road movie.
In 2011 Gong acted opposite Cha Seung-won in the TV series The Greatest Love. Written by the Hong Sisters, the romantic comedy is set in the entertainment industry and about an unlikely romance between a has-been pop-star and a top actor. The series was a big hit with audiences, resulting in increased popularity for Cha and Gong. She was also praised for her naturalistic, no-nonsense acting, which served to balance Cha's wacky antics. The Greatest Love swept the MBC Drama Awards, including a Top Excellence Award for Gong (her third consecutive, after Thank You and Pasta). Gong later won Best Actress for TV at the Baeksang Arts Awards.
She worked again with Kim Tae-yong for Beautiful 2012, a series of four "micro-movies" produced by Chinese internet platform Youku that explore the concept of "what is beautiful?". In Kim's short film You Are More Than Beautiful, Park Hee-soon plays a man who who hires an actress named Young-hee (Gong) to pretend to be his fiancée when he introduces her to his dying father in Jeju Island. The short's Korean title translates to "Her Performance," and in a charming scene, Young-hee slips into the hospital room and sings a Korean opera song to the unconscious father (in a room with five other seriously ill elderly men). You Are More Than Beautiful later received a theatrical release in 2013.
Uninterested in stereotypical pretty roles, Gong said she preferred playing multi-faceted women, like the laidback, unpredictable female lead with unshaved armpit hair in Love Fiction. Known for candor on set and in public, Gong openly admitted that she had problems with her character and took her complaints to its director Jeon Kye-soo. Though Gong said she would rather continue making small-scale films rather than do a shallow blockbuster, Love Fiction was her most commercial feature yet, and it did well at the box office with more than 1.7 million admissions.
She reunited with Love Fiction co-star Ha Jung-woo in 577 Project, a documentary that follows a group of actors walking 577 kilometers (358 miles) across the nation.
Read more about this topic: Gong Hyo-jin, Career
Famous quotes containing the words mainstream and/or popularity:
“At times it seems that the media have become the mainstream culture in children’s lives. Parents have become the alternative. Americans once expected parents to raise their children in accordance with the dominant cultural messages. Today they are expected to raise their children in opposition to it.”
—Ellen Goodman (20th century)
“The nation looked upon him as a deserter, and he shrunk into insignificancy and an earldom.... He was fixed in the house of lords, that hospital of incurables, and his retreat to popularity was cut off; for the confidence of the public, when once great and once lost, is never to be regained.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)