South Korean actress Roh Yoon-seo said she focused on the emotional wounds of her character Saeng-gang in Netflix’s supernatural period series “The East Palace,” particularly the trauma of being rejected because of her ability to hear the dead.
Roh plays Saeng-gang, a former court lady who possesses the supernatural ability and returns to the royal palace, where she joins Gu-cheon, played by Nam Joo-hyuk, in investigating dark forces and long-buried secrets.
“The East Palace” recently topped Netflix’s daily series chart in the Philippines, giving viewers a darker side of Roh, who is known for dramas such as “Crash Course in Romance” and “20th Century Girl.”
During a virtual roundtable with select Filipino reporters, including The Philippine STAR, Roh said Saeng-gang initially regards her ability as a curse because it led to her expulsion from the palace.
“Saeng-gang is a character who was driven out of the palace because of her ability to hear spirits,” Roh said through an interpreter.
“I thought that because of that painful experience, she thinks hearing the spirits is a curse. She is someone who lives with the pain, thinking that everything happened because of her.”
Roh imagined that Saeng-gang spent years away from the palace trying to block out the voices she could naturally hear.
“Because there is so much intense energy within the palace, I thought that during her life outside the palace, she was probably always someone who shut her ears and didn’t listen because of what that had previously caused her,” she said.
Her return to the palace forces Saeng-gang to confront the ability she had tried to suppress and the memories associated with it.
Roh pointed to a scene in which Saeng-gang tries to overcome her fear and listen to the spirits again as an important moment in the character’s development.
“There’s a scene where she is trying to overcome the fear that she has struggled with for so long because she now wants to hear the voices again,” she said.
“When I was doing that scene, I remember thinking about all of the accumulated time and emotions that she must have gone through before that moment.”
As Saeng-gang gradually accepts her ability, she discovers that she can use it to help others and guide restless spirits toward resolution.
The series explores unfinished business and unresolved resentment, themes that also shaped Roh’s understanding of Saeng-gang.
Roh said revisiting the past can help when a person needs to resolve something, but she believes moving forward can be healthier when the past only causes pain.
“I think if it’s a part of the past that you feel needs to be dealt with and resolved, then it is right to revisit that,” she said.
“However, if it’s something that’s just eating away at you, something that is haunting you, then I think the better direction is to forget about it and move on.”
Roh said she did not rely on specific Korean folklore, shamanistic practices or beliefs about communicating with the afterlife when preparing for the role. Instead, she focused on Saeng-gang’s personal history and worked closely with the production team to portray how the character hears invisible voices.
“I did think about how she was going to hear these voices and how that was going to come across on screen,” Roh said. “That was actually a very close collaboration between me and the camera work.”
She explained that the camera movements reflected the proximity and intensity of the voices Saeng-gang heard.
“When the sounds reached her, the camera would also reach the character from a certain distance,” she said. “And when the camera was moving away from her, that’s when she would hear less of the voices. So, it involved working closely with the camera.”
“The East Palace” also features spirits and supernatural creatures inspired by traditional Korean myths.
“A lot of them come from traditional Korean myths, so they’re going to be something that you’ve never seen before,” Roh said.
Asked whether she would rather see or hear spirits, Roh said she would choose to see them because she believes people can look away from something they see but cannot escape something they hear.
“When you hear them, that’s when it gets really scary,” she said. “When you hear a little baby spirit laugh in the middle of the night, it will wake you up and scare you to your wits’ end.”
“If you see it, I think you can kind of try to block it away, but hearing — you can’t run from that. So, I think seeing is the better of the two,” she added.
“The East Palace” is streaming on Netflix.
