Why Park Eun Bin Doesn't Want You to Root for Her Character in Disney+ Series 'Hyper Knife'

Park Eun Bin, known for her warm and lovable portrayal of a lawyer on the autism spectrum in "Extraordinary Attorney Woo," takes on a starkly different challenge and a darker role in "Hyper Knife," a medical thriller now streaming on Disney+.

- Nathalie M. Tomada

This time around though, the South Korean star doesn't want audiences to root for her character, Jeong Seok, a genius neurosurgeon with a fractured moral compass.

"This character is very anti-social. There's a genre called picaresque, wherein the bad guy is actually the protagonist of the show. So she's not just a villain in the show, but she uses that anti-social nature of hers as motivation to develop her character," the South Korean star said through an English interpreter during a virtual presscon for the show.

"So it might be difficult for you to relate to her, but at the end of the show, you might feel like, 'Okay, there might be a person like this.' That's the level of how I want to persuade the viewers about my character.

"I don't want you to root for her, I don't want you to fully understand her and relate to her, because she's a psychopath. But I just want you to know that there could be people like this in the world. Those are food for thought, I guess, and I want you to join me on this ride of hers with all those emotional rollercoasters," she candidly added.

As mentioned earlier, Jeong Seok is a brilliant but anti-social neurosurgeon but she is forced to operate in the shadows after being stripped of her medical license.

"I think that once I met my character, everything got a lot more fierce and intense. I think just the right word, with everything, is fierce," she said. "I had to be fierce and tenacious with everything that I did."

She was immediately drawn to the character when she first read the script. "When I was shooting this other show, 'Castaway Diva,' I got the script, and I was reading the first page, and it had such an intense log line — neurosurgeon character — and just reading about the character hooked me right away. I was drawn to it almost instantly.