NK forced actor to get plastic surgery for Kim Il-sung role

The North Korean regime forced an actor to undergo plastic surgery for a film about the Soviet Army officer who saved Kim Il-sung, founder of the Stalinist regime, it has been reported.

Russian TV channel TV-Center reported this on Jan. 25, while broadcasting a documentary called “Comrade Kim, the Prince of Chosun (Korea),” which covers the power succession from grandfather Kim Il-sung to the third generation of Kim Jong-un.

In 1985, Chosun Art Film Studio of North Korea and Mosfilm Studios of the USSR co-produced a movie, “Eternal Comrade,” about the Soviet Army’s first lieutenant Yakov Novichenko, who saved the leader of North Korea from a grenade attack meant to assassinate him just less than one year after Korea’s independence from Japanese colonial rule.

The scenario is about the incident that occurred at the square of Pyongyang Station in 1946. While Kim Il-sung was addressing the public in a ceremony marking the March 1 Independence Movement, a young man threw a grenade toward the podium. But Novichenko saved Kim, dramatically throwing his body and smothering the device.

Novichenko lost his right hand but was fortunate enough to survive the attack thanks to a book he was holding to his chest.

TV-Center disclosed that the North Korean authorities forced Li Yong-il, the actor who played Kim Il-sung in the film, to get plastic surgery, quoting Russian surgeon Igor Volf.

“One day, officials from the North Korean Embassy came to me and asked me to make the actor look just like Kim,” Volf said. “It is critical for the production of the film.”

“I wondered why the actor has to have plastic surgery rather than put on makeup,” Volf said. “But they insisted that he has to get surgery as make-up is not enough to make the actor look like Kim.”

After fixing a date, they took Li to the hospital in a special vehicle and performed plastic surgery on his face based on the picture of Kim Il-sung in his youth, according to Volf.

The program also reported the history of North Korea’s nuclear development. For the first time, it revealed that in February 1990, just before the collapse of the U.S.S.R., Vladimir Kryuchkov, then chief of the spy agency, the KGB, reported to Mikhail Gorbachev concerns that North Korea had nearly completely developed nuclear weapons.

It shows that Russia has been keenly watching the procedure of North Korean nuclear development since the early 1990s.

The film also pointed out that North Korea is responsible for sinking the warship Cheonan in March 2010 and the Yeonpyeong Island attack in November of the same year. This is the first time that Russian media has ever released a program that officially attributes the sinking of the naval vessel to North Korea.

Moreover, it introduces the background of young leader Kim Jong-un in detail, reporting that he studied at an international school in Switzerland. It also said that the power elite in North Korea are uniting with Kim as the center of power for fear of being purged in the case that South Korea unifies the Korean Peninsula, absorbing the North when it collapses.

They also described Kim Jong-un as the fattest leader in North Korea, saying, “He is 1.75 meters tall and weighs 90 kilograms.”