Soo Ae - Career

Career

Soo Ae nearly became a member of a pop idol group. Fresh out of high school, a record agent approached the young stunner on the street in the trendy Apgujeong area. She spent six months in grueling practice, but in the end had no album to put out. She reminisced in an interview, "I didn't sing well, but the six months I spent with the team was so fun. I was lucky to get into acting."

She made her small screen debut in 2002 in a one-act drama on MBC, going on to star in Love Letter, Merry Go Round and April Kiss. Her hit historical drama Emperor of the Sea was exported to other Asian countries, South America and the Middle East, introducing Soo Ae to a wider international audience.

With her classical beauty and pure, graceful image, Soo Ae gained the moniker "queen of tears". But she revamped that image in the 2007 romantic comedy Two Outs in the Ninth Inning opposite Lee Jung-jin, playing a 30-year-old foul-mouthed, disheveled and jaded single woman struggling with life and love. Soo Ae in reality famously has a husky, neutral voice, which helped her tomboyish performance feel so natural. But her voice hasn't always been a plus. "I've been told many times that my voice would be a detriment to my career," she said. "When I first got started, a lot of viewers posted comments online that they changed the channel because of the way I talk. It was odd because I thought of my husky voice as my biggest asset. So I would tell people, 'Keep on listening, you'll get to like it.'"

After a successful big screen debut in A Family, Soo Ae starred opposite Jung Jae-young in the comedy Wedding Campaign, and Lee Byung-hun in the melodrama Once in a Summer.

In 2008 she was cast as the titular Sunny in a film about an average housewife who becomes a "consolatory band" singer in order to search for her husband who has been dispatched to fight alongside American troops in the Vietnam War. Director Lee Jun-ik sought to tell a war story from a female-centric point of view, saying the film grazes upon a broader sense of love and humanitarian concern as it depicts a long voyage of self-discovery. In a scene where she drinks heavily at a U.S. army base, Soo Ae revealed that she drank more than half a bottle of whisky at the director’s criticism that she didn't look real enough. As a result of drinking so much alcohol, she became really drunk, adding reality to the scene where she throws up in the toilet and blacks out. Her commitment to the film paid off, and Soo Ae received multiple Best Actress awards for her performance.

Her 2009 film The Sword with No Name depicts a desperate romance between the last queen of the Joseon Dynasty and her bodyguard. Empress Myeongseong, a forward-thinking advocate of modernity, wields her political influence to further her ideals, but is often at odds with her orthodox father-in-law, regent Daewon-gun. The movie is loosely based on history, with clearly fictional elements. Soo Ae said the role "was something I had always wanted to do from the moment I started my acting career. When I got the screenplay, I said yes without a moment's hesitation. Playing Empress Myeongseong was not easy, because in addition to the mother of the nation, I had to show her womanly and human side, the joy and anguish she felt at being in love." Having to wear heavy wigs and layers of Korean traditional costumes in the steamy hot summer made the job even more difficult. The fact that she had to appear in almost every scene was another challenge. Describing herself as "timid" and "too introverted", Soo Ae credits her co-star Jo Seung-woo for making it easier for her to fully absorb herself in the love aspect of her role, such that it felt "like were actually in a relationship during the shoot."

Frustrated by usually receiving melodrama scripts and wanting to take on roles in different genres, Soo Ae next starred in the 2010 suspense thriller Midnight FM. She said she decided to challenge herself by choosing the role of a strong female character fighting against a villain. She talked about the heightened fear she felt in a confined studio as her radio DJ character receives threatening phone calls from a kidnapper (played by Yoo Ji-tae), as well as the physical difficulty of filming chase and fight scenes in high heels. She tied with Yoon Jeong-hee (Poetry) for Best Actress at the Blue Dragon Film Awards.

In her return to television, Soo Ae played a cold-blooded double agent in Athena: Goddess of War, undergoing martial arts training to perform her intense action scenes in the spy series.

Then in the miniseries A Thousand Days' Promise by famed drama writer Kim Soo-hyun, Soo Ae impressed critics and audiences with her unsentimental portrayal of a woman who is slowly losing her memory due to Alzheimer's disease.

She next played a woman born into poverty who will let nothing stand in her way as she tries to become the First Lady of Korea in Yawang ("King of Ambition"), from the same manhwa artist as Daemul.