K-actor Park Seo-joon returns to small screen with 18-year love story in Surely Tomorrow

SEOUL – South Korean actor Park Seo-joon has not done a proper romantic television drama in five years.

Ever since he sparked a cultural moment as the dogged underdog Park Sae-ro-yi in Itaewon Class (2020), he has kept busy with bigger-budget fare – a cameo in Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero movie The Marvels (2023), Netflix’s period horror Gyeongseong Creature (2023 to 2024) and apocalyptic film Concrete Utopia (2023).

But sitting before a room full of reporters at a hotel in Seoul’s Guro-gu on Dec 4, the 37-year-old seemed ready to scale back down.

“I’ve been working steadily, just on different platforms,” Park said at the press conference for Surely Tomorrow, his new series premiering on Prime Video on Dec 6. “But I think I’ve come back with a more mature way of expressing things.”

The drama follows entertainment reporter Gyeong-do as he gets tangled up with an old college flame Ji-woo under messy circumstances: He is covering a cheating scandal, and she happens to be the wife of the man at its centre.

Their history stretches back 18 years – a romance at age 20, a second try at 26 and, now, this awkward third chapter in their late 30s.

The premise involving an entertainment reporter as the lead naturally drew plenty of questions from the assembled press.

South Korean director Lim Hyun-wook, himself a former reporter before moving into variety shows and dramas – most recently 2023’s smash hit King The Land – said the profession was baked into the set-up from the start.

“The whole story kicks off because Gyeong-do’s job puts him in this situation,” he said. “Without him being a reporter, none of it could have happened.”

Park drew from his own experience working the press circuit. “Early in my career, I must’ve hit 50 to 70 newsrooms in a single week doing interviews,” he said. “I still remember the vibe, the different atmospheres of newsrooms. All of that came flooding back.”

South Korean actress Won Ji-an, 26, plays Ji-woo, a chaebol heiress whose polished surface masks deeper insecurities.

Won broke out in 2024 as the doomed Player 380 in the second season of hit K-series Squid Game (2021 to 2025), the tough-as-nails tomboy who meets a brutal end. Surely Tomorrow marks her first lead in a major network drama.

The 11-year age gap between the leads predictably came up. Park admitted he had been self-conscious at first.

“But once we actually met, she was incredibly mature,” he said. “I don’t know what she’s been through, but there’s this seasoned quality to her.”

Won brushed off concerns about working alongside someone a decade older. “I actually learnt a lot from the experience,” she said. “I haven’t hit my 30s yet, so whenever I needed to figure out how to play that age, I’d just watch him and follow his lead.”

The structure jumps between three time periods – not chronologically, but emotionally. “What matters isn’t when something happened,” Lim said. “It’s where these two are at emotionally in any given moment.”

Park pushed back a bit on the “romance” label. “To me, it feels closer to melodrama,” he said. “There’s a lot here that people can actually relate to. These are conflicts rooted in reality.” THE KOREA HERALD/ASIA NEWS NETWORK