Fall for Cha Eun-woo as a K-pop-loving priest in Island, Amazon Prime Video’s most anticipated K-drama

SEOUL – The cast of South Korean horror-fantasy series Island had to scream, run and fight while staring at balls stuck atop poles for their latest roles, pitting them against grotesque demons visualised via computer graphics. 

At an interview with regional media held in Seoul, leading lady Lee Da-hee says she felt a little silly in certain scenes.

“The stand-ins who act as demons are in very tight green suits and, because the demons are supposed to be very tall, a long stick is stuck to the suit with a ball on top as its head. I had to look at the ball while acting,” says the 37-year-old actress. 

Island premieres its first part on Friday on Amazon Prime Video. A second part is expected to premiere in the first half of 2023.

The K-drama also stars actors Kim Nam-gil (Emergency Declaration, 2022) and Sung Joon (I Need Romance 3, 2014), as well as K-pop idol Cha Eun-woo (True Beauty, 2020 to 2021).

It tells the tale of demon-slayer Van (Kim) and hotel heiress Mi-ho (Lee), who crossed paths with Van in a past life, and how the pair have to save the world from evil. 

Kim, 42, says: “The key message we want to deliver through this drama is causality, especially what you have done in a previous life. It’s not so much about whether you believe in past lives or not, but the idea that everything is related and there is a law of causality at play.”

Island is streaming service Amazon Prime Video’s most anticipated K-drama title to date and highlights its commitment to Korean content. 

In August 2022, it launched localised versions of its service – with local-language interfaces, subtitles and original content – in Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Local-language originals in the works include a trio of situational comedy improv shows – Comedy Island: Indonesia, Comedy Island: Thailand and Comedy Island: Philippines – featuring celebrities who are stranded on an island and have to make their own escape.

But K-dramas are also essential in the chase for viewers in South-east Asia, where Korean content is particularly popular. 

 

Amazon is a belated player in the field, given that streaming giants such as Netflix and Disney+ have an extensive slate of original K-content, such as Netflix’s award-winning Squid Game (2021) and Disney+’s multiple projects with juggernaut K-pop boy band BTS, including the upcoming documentary BTS Monuments: Beyond The Star.

But the streamer is playing catch-up by beefing up its offerings in 2022, with exclusive K-dramas such as the Park Min-young vehicle Love In Contract and the Suzy Bae-led thriller Anna. 

In an e-mail response to The Straits Times, Mr David Simonsen, business director of Prime Video, South-east Asia, says: “We understand that our Korean titles such as Love In Contract, May I Help You and Curtain Call are very well-received by our customers in South-east Asian countries.

“This is why we’re committed to deliver a diverse range of Korean content for fans, not just for our consumers in South-east Asia, but also globally.

“We hope to delight fans of action and fantasy all around the world with Island, and are excited to see the show find new audiences from different countries on Prime Video.“

Island is a cross-generational intellectual property.

It is based on a manhwa, or comic series, first published in 1997 that became an instant hit then and saw a fresh wave of fans in 2016 when it was released on Web comic platform Naver.

It also features a stacked live-action cast that includes boy band Astro’s Cha, who has a whopping 31.7 million followers on Instagram. 

Cha, consistently ranked among the most beautiful idols of K-pop and given the moniker of “face genius” in South Korea for his manga-esque good looks, takes on the role of Yohan, a priest who gets sent to Jeju to exorcise demons.

In his first scene, Cha is seen dressed in the traditional black cassock as he towers over a possessed woman on a bed and splashes holy water all over her. 

Kim says: “I expect all the women watching the show to fall in love with him, especially since he goes around saying ‘noona, noona’ (Korean for older sister) a lot in it.”

While being a priest may seem far-fetched given the 25-year-old’s real-life status as a K-pop idol, Cha says: “One of the set-ups of the character is that he is a big K-pop and K-drama fan, so I channelled that part of my job into the performance.”

 

Playing a priest who was raised overseas, Cha has scenes where he is required to speak Latin and Italian. But those scenes did not go well initially.

At a separate press conference, director Bae Jong reveals: “There was one scene in which Eun-woo spoke Italian and we thought he did well, but the Italian actor in the same scene said he couldn’t understand him. So Eun-woo had to learn his lines again.”

For Sung Joon, 32, who plays Van’s fellow demon-slayer Gungtan, his challenges were more appearance-based.

He sports a head of ethereal silver hair in the series, which he had to bleach seven or eight times over the course of filming, damaging his scalp in the process.

 

Kim jokes: “Every time Sung Joon came to my room, it was like a dog had been there because he was shedding silver hair everywhere.”

The cast spent months filming together on Jeju Island, a unique setting that was key to Bae.

He says: “The impression people have of Jeju tends to be that it’s a paradise. But for this story, we added demons to it and that contributes to the mystique of the place.”

To help the cast and crew bond during the Jeju shoot, Kim – the big brother of the group – organised many gatherings, including football games.

“Everybody is a great athlete. Da-hee is so fast that I doubt the demons can catch her. Sung Joon is our midfielder and Eun-woo is a shadow striker,” says Kim.

Island also boasts many action scenes, with the main cast engaging in multiple fights and chase sequences. In fact, the action does not stop once it begins.

 

Lee reveals: “It’s really memorable, the first time Mi-ho meets Van in the first episode. It’s an action sequence that begins in the airport. The director said as long as audiences stick to watching the drama until that scene, from that point on, the series is action-packed.”

Island premieres on Amazon Prime Video on Friday.

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Here is a peek at the currently available and upcoming Korean shows to binge-watch on Amazon Prime Video.

Love Is For Suckers

Actress Lee Da-hee and K-pop boy band Super Junior’s Choi Si-won play friends who become lovers in this romantic comedy series that kicks off with a reality television show. Park Jae-hoon (Choi) is a plastic surgeon who has given up finding a partner, while his friend of 20 years Goo Yeo-reum (Lee) is a television producer who needs help finding a cast member for her reality series. Desperate to make her show a success, she turns to Jae-hoon for help, but the show ends up bringing them together in ways they did not expect.

Anna

 

A psychological thriller reminiscent of Inventing Anna (2022), based on the true story of socialite scammer Anna Delvey, actress Suzy Bae takes on the title role as a poor girl who never managed to go to college. She starts with a small lie that later snowballs as she transforms herself into Anna, a sophisticated literature professor. When she bumps into someone from her past, the house of cards she built threatens to fall.

Curtain Call

 

In this heart-warming drama about family, love and loss, Kang Ha-neul plays a struggling actor, Jae-heon, who is approached for a strange role – impersonating the long-lost grandson of South Korea’s top hotelier Geum-soon, who is dying of cancer. Geum-soon was separated from her husband and child while escaping North Korea during the Korean War. In a bid to fulfil her last wish to see the grandson she lost contact with, Geum-soon’s granddaughter – from her re-marriage – employs Jae-heon for the job of a lifetime.

The Forbidden Marriage

 

This period comedy-drama is based on screenwriter Chun Ji-hye’s Web novel of the same title, which was also released as a webtoon.

When his beloved wife dies, Joseon king Lee Heon (Kim Young-dae) is devastated and enacts a marriage ban on the country. Seven years pass and the ban has taken a toll on citizens and country, but the royal refuses to budge. He arrests Ye So-rang (Park Ju-hyun), a woman secretly running a matchmaking business, but events take a turn when she pretends to be possessed by the ghost of Lee Heon’s late spouse.

Payback: Money And Power (premieres on Jan 6)

 

The head of a global equity fund, a female army major and a young prosecutor come together to fight a cartel that colludes with the law and pushes people to death. In this revenge-themed series, Oscar-winning Parasite’s (2019) Lee Sun-kyun leads the cast as a trading tycoon who investigates the cartel after he suspects that it had a hand in his mentor’s death.

Alienoid Part 1 (premieres Jan 27)

 

This over-the-top, comedic and time-bending science-fiction two-parter was released in South Korea in July. The film features two timelines – one set in the ancient Goryeo era in 1391 where magic user Muruk (Ryu Jun-yeol) is on the hunt for a special sword called the Divine Blade; and in 2022, where Guard (Kim Woo-bin) is on the hunt for an evil alien who is trying to escape prison. The two events intersect when the doors of time open.