 |
| Actress Kang Han-na played the role of Yoo Jeong in the period romance, "Bloody Heart." Courtesy of KEYEAST |
By Lee Gyu-lee
Actress Kang Han-na expressed that working on her latest series, period romance, "Bloody Heart," gave her a valuable experience.
"I'm very grateful for this series, as I felt I've grown a lot after meeting my character, Yoo Jeong, and it gave me valuable experience. I feel this role helped me show my different sides in terms of acting so this piece will be remembered as a very meaningful and valuable work to me," the actor said in a release, according to her agency, KeyEast, Wednesday.
The 16-part romance series follows the love story between King Lee Tae (Lee Joon) and the daughter of a noble family, Yoo Jeong (Kang).
Caught up in an intense fight for power, Lee Tae was forced to give up his love, Yoo Jeong, to pursue his goal of taking full control as a king without powerful high-ranking government official Park Gye-won (Jang Hyuk). Meanwhile, Yoo Jeong, who became a concubine to the king, tries to become the queen to save her own life.
Amid the veiled feud, the two lovers become political enemies.
The series was led by director Yoo Young-eun, whose previous work is the 2020 melodrama series, "How to Buy a Friend," and is written by scriptwriter Park Pil-joo, who scripted the 2018 drama, "Marry Me Now."
The series on Tuesday with its highest viewership rating of 8.9 percent.
 |
| Scenes from the series, "Bloody Heart" / Courtesy of KBS |
Kang's character Yoo Jung, who is intelligent and warmhearted, used to run a business to help the poor. She is the daughter of a noble family and joins the royal palace to exonerate her late father's accusation of poisoning Lee Tae's mother.
The actress said she tried to set different tones in different parts of the series to show changes in the character.
"Before she comes to live in the palace, I tried to use a more comfortable tone and dialect, giving more ranges in pitch. And after she came to the palace, I used a more reserved, determined tone to portray her tenacity not to get swept up by her surroundings," she said. "But at the same time, I tried to keep the sense of the warm tone of Yoo Jeong's personality in taking care of the people around her."
Kang added that portraying the multi-layered relationship between the king and her character was difficult as the two lovers are caught up in complex situations.
"We worked together on the scenes that were the hardest in terms of emotions. So we each had our own struggles with our characters. And we were able to accomplish those scenes as we went through that difficulty together," she said. "Of all the scenes, there was no single scene that was easy for us. And because we kept ourselves on our toes, we were able to maintain the tension between the characters throughout the whole series."
