At a press conference held Sept. 4 at SBS headquarters in Mok-dong, Seoul, the stars of the new Friday-Saturday drama "Queen Mantis" (written by Lee Young-jong, directed by Byun Young-joo) ― Ko Hyun-jung, Jang Dong-yoon, Jo Sung-ha and Lee El ― joined director Byun to introduce the series and tease what’s ahead.
Ko, who revealed last year that she underwent major surgery and appeared noticeably slimmer at the time, addressed her health head-on. “It’s true I wasn’t well, and I had to step away from 'Queen Mantis' for a bit before returning to set,” she said. “When I came back, I was met with so much care. The amazing actors around me helped a great deal, and it made me even more attached to this project.”
"Queen Mantis" is a high-tension crime thriller set more than 20 years after a sadistic serial killer dubbed “Mantis” was caught ― only for a string of copycat murders to erupt. To crack the case, a detective is forced into an unthinkable alliance with the person he’s hated his entire life: his mother, the original “Mantis.” Ko plays Jung I-shin, the notorious killer known by that moniker.
Director Byun, a longtime fan of Ko, said he knew immediately whom he wanted. “The moment I read the script, I thought, ‘This should be Ko Hyun-jung,’” he shared. “If Ko took this on, I felt I’d see a face I’d never even imagined. As soon as I was approached to direct, I suggested Ko for the role ― and it turned out to be one of my best decisions last year.”
Fresh off praise for her turn as a killer in Netflix’s "Mask Girl," Ko said "Queen Mantis" lets her go even deeper. “On Mask Girl, three actors shared one character, so my screen time wasn’t large,” she explained. “But it felt great that someone saw me in that kind of role ― it opened the floodgates for characters like this. When "Queen Mantis" came, hearing that Director Byun was at the helm made it an instant yes. As an actor, you naturally crave genre work, and I really wanted to experience his direction.”
Jung I-shin is both a mother and a serial killer ― an uneasy paradox, especially as she’s the mother of detective Cha Soo-yeol (played by Jang Dong-yoon). “It’s hard to imagine ‘mom’ and ‘serial killer’ coexisting,” Ko noted. “So I looked at Jung I-shin’s life as a whole. She’s someone’s mother, someone’s daughter, and a person with her own story. Rather than ‘I’m a mom,’ I felt ‘I’m Jung I-shin’ was the stronger core.”
On her approach, she added, “I trusted the director to decide how far to push or pull back. I kept asking myself, ‘If I were Jung I-shin, what would I do in my own life?’ I left the calibration to Director Byun, but for every scene I tried to give him many versions so he’d have a wide range of choices in the edit.”
"Queen Mantis" premieres Friday, Sept. 5 at 9:50 p.m. KST on SBS, following "The Winning Try."
[Photo by Baik Seung-Chul]
(SBS Entertainment News | Kang Sun-ae)