Koo Kyo-hwan, Go Youn-jung talk 'We Are All Trying Here,' a drama about a man eaten alive by envy
Few TV shows flinch from their own titles. The Korean name of JTBC's new weekend drama translates, roughly, to "Everyone Is Fighting Their Own Worthlessness."
The English version somewhat dulls the sting, but either way, you get the pitch: This is a show about a man who looks around at his friends doing just fine and figures he's the only loser in the room.
Director Cha Young-hoon, leads Koo Kyo-hwan and Go Youn-jung, and the rest of the cast met Friday afternoon at a hotel in Seoul's Mapo-gu to talk up the odd-sounding project ahead of its Saturday premiere.
Front and center of the show is Koo as Dong-man, a wannabe director 20 years into chasing his debut with nothing to show for the grind but a stack of ugly feelings about himself. Long an indie-circuit fixture, the 43-year-old has broken into the mainstream in recent years; last winter's romance "Once We Were Us," which became a sleeper hit at the Korean box office, proved he could anchor a proper romance.
"When I first read the script, it was simple: I just badly wanted to do it," Koo said. "The more time I spent with Dong-man, the more it felt like he was someone who actually existed out there somewhere. And if he were real, I'd want to make a movie with him."
"He's drowning in jealousy, inferiority, anxiety — every ugly emotion you can name," the director said of his protagonist. "Then someone shows up who tells him, 'you matter too,' and with that in his corner, he starts working his way out."
The catharsis, though, may not arrive the way viewers expect.
"This isn't the feel-good story of a failed director finally debuting and becoming a box office king," the director said. "It's more like a small pat on the back, a way of telling viewers, hey, everyone's living like this. Hang in there. You're not alone."
As it happens, that low-key-consolation over cathartic payoff is the stock-in-trade of screenwriter Park Hae-young. The screenwriter built her reputation on slow-burn character studies of insecure, broken people finding their way toward something like grace: her "My Mister" and "My Liberation Notes" still remain the touchstones anyone reaches for when they're looking for a little comfort.
This time, that signature comes paired with the hottest star of the moment: Go Youn-jung. Fresh from the hits "Resident Playbook" and "Can This Love Be Translated?" Go plays Eun-a, a film producer who becomes the unlikely calm in Dong-man's storm.
"Honestly, the feeling was less pressure and more gratitude — the fact that she wanted to write me into this was unreal," Go said of Park. "Dong-man carries a huge share of the lines, and Eun-a has all this empty space between them. I came in ready to fill those gaps so they wouldn't drag, but Kyo-hwan kept giving me something new every take. The reactions just happened on their own."
Oh Jung-se and Kang Mal-geum play a married couple in the business — a director and the CEO of a production company — while "When Life Gives You Tangerines" star Park Hae-joon plays Dong-man's older brother, who gives him the roughest time about his stalled career. Han Sun-hwa plays a top actress navigating her own cracks beneath the glossy surface.
"I had the best ratings of my career at this network with 'The World of the Married,'" Park said. "I'm back with another top-tier director and writer, and I'm dreaming of putting up new numbers."
The three-way timeslot battle has generated some chatter, even if it matters less than it used to in the streaming era. Airing Saturdays and Sundays on cable network JTBC, the series goes head-to-head with IU and Byun Woo-seok's fan-favorite royal rom-com "Perfect Crown" and the supernatural legal drama "Phantom Lawyer."
Cha wasn't feeling especially confident about it.
"My heart's on a hot plate right now," he said. "The other shows in our slot are all really good. Every show has its own flavor, and I just hope ours is the one some viewers end up loving."
Go kept it closer to the work.
"There's a line in the script where someone says there's no such thing as a good mass of emotions," she said. "When I first read it, I thought, this is how the writer sees people — and I really felt that. It made me want to stack up enough good ones from here on out that maybe I could become that mass myself."
"We Are All Trying Here" premieres Saturday at 10:40 p.m. on JTBC, with streaming available on Netflix.
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