PUBLISHED ONAugust 11, 2023 9:23 AMByYeo Shu HuiFor fans of South Korean dramas, the culture of sending coffee or food trucks to support their favourite Hallyu actors for their ongoing project is a familiar sight during drama productions.
Friends of the actors may also send the truck as a thoughtful gesture to express their gratitude to the cast and crew.
So imagine how South Korean actress Go Youn-jung felt when her on-screen father, actor Ryu Seung-ryong, sent a coffee truck to the set for her even though they didn't film together in the beginning of their new Disney+ drama Moving.
In a recent interview provided to AsiaOne to promote the drama, the 27-year-old actress, who plays high school student Jang Hui-soo with regenerative superpowers, said: "Seung-ryong said he sent the coffee truck so his daughter wouldn't get into trouble and to help her get along with her friends.
"It really felt like he was my dad, and I was very grateful."
In return for this heartwarming gesture, Youn-jung also sent a coffee truck for the 52-year-old, who plays former secret agent-turned-fried chicken shop owner Jang Ju-won, when they were not working together in the same scene.
Their supportive "father-daughter" relationship was so known among crew members that they would update her on how her "father" was doing.
"Seung-ryong had a lot of action scenes — probably the most out of all the cast members — and it made me sad whenever the crew told me about his action scenes and said, 'Hui-soo, your dad had a really rough time yesterday'," shared Youn-jung.
Moving is a 20-episode superhero thriller-action drama that centres around a South Korea National Intelligence Service (NIS) black ops team consisting of agents with superpowers who mysteriously dispersed one day.
A few decades later, high school student Kim Bong-seok (Lee Jung-ha) — who is the son of former NIS agents Lee Mi-hyun (Han Hyo-joo) and Kim Doo-sik (Zo In-sung) — meets Hui-soo (Youn-jung).
Bong-seok has inherited both his parents' superpowers of super sense and flying, and becomes close friends with Hui-soo after discovering each other's secret. In the same class as them is Lee Gang-hoon (Kim Do-hoon), who is committed to keeping his supernatural strength and speed a secret.
In the meantime, a mysterious delivery driver named Frank (Ryu Seung-beom) begins murdering people with powers across Seoul. As these teens try to hide their special abilities from others, their parents struggle to protect them from danger.
Moving is adapted from the webtoon of the same name written by Kangfull, and also stars Cha Tae-hyun, Kim Hee-won and Kim Sung-kyun.
Youn-jung and Seung-ryong are not the only actors who had established a good parent-child relationship on set.
Hyo-joo, who plays retired secret agent Lee Mi-hyun, also developed a good relationship with her on-screen son Jung-ha, who plays high-school student Bong-seok.
Speaking about working with the 36-year-old actress, Jung-ha, 25, said in an interview provided to AsiaOne that he did not know how to approach Hyo-joo at first because she is an experienced actress.
However, he was grateful that Hyo-joo looked after him and guided him through the production by sharing a lot of acting advice with him along the way.
He shared: "She took the initiative to suggest that we address each other as mum and son to make sure that I could feel comfortable around her. Even now, I feel more comfortable calling her mum than her name!"
Jung-ha added that he was grateful to Hyo-joo for performing together with him in emotional scenes even though the cameras were only filming him.
"She would continue to perform with me to help me stay in the moment, even shedding tears. I was very moved and it really helped me immerse myself in the scene," he elaborated.
For Hyo-joo, portraying a mother is not something new, as she has done it previously in the 2010 South Korea historical drama Dong Yi.
However, when it comes to playing a mother to a high school student, it still posed certain challenges for her, even though she has 20 years of acting experience.
Hyo-joo shared that it was such a "daunting challenge" for her to portray Mi-hyun's maternal instinct that she even "contemplated turning down the project".
She said: "I was so nervous about this role that from about a week before shooting began, I wasn't able to eat or sleep. On the first day of filming, we were doing a scene where my character has seaweed soup and I immediately had an upset stomach."
She added that she drew a lot of inspiration from her own mother when playing Mi-hyun.
"I thought back on all the sacrifices she made for me, and that's how I connected with the character in the end," she shared.
Besides her challenges with portraying maternal instinct, she also found it difficult to see someone as mature as Jung-ha as her son at first.
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Hyo-joo shared: "I thought it would be difficult to build a bond if we started getting to know each other after the start of production and I didn't want that awkwardness to come across on camera… I felt a huge amount of pressure and started thinking about ways to improve our on-screen chemistry before production began."
She decided to message Jung-ha before filming commenced and they started to refer to each other as mother and son to establish their chemistry.
Speaking about working with Jung-ha, she shared: "It was amazing; after working on the set together for such a long time, I realised I started to see him like my son — he feels like family to me, and even when we finished filming, we kept calling each other 'mum' and 'son'."
Moving is now available on Disney+ with a new episode released every Wednesday.
No part of this article can be reproduced without permission from AsiaOne.
