If Hollywood has Demi Moore, Chungmuro has Lee Hye-young.

As Demi Moore, a ‘Hollywood star born in 1962’, is enjoying a second heyday after showing off a drastic transformation in the movie ‘Substance’, the global film industry is paying attention to ‘same-age Chungmuro star’ Lee Hye-young, who is foreshadowing a drastic transformation in acting that makes you forget her age in ‘Breakthrough’, which opens on the 30th.

O Unusual 60-year-old female lead ‘unprecedented character’

Lee Hye-young plays the role of Jo-gak, a legendary killer who has been eliminating cockroach-like humans without emotion for 40 years in the movie ‘Breakthrough’, based on the novel of the same name by writer Koo Byung-mo.She is called ‘Godmother’ and is revered as a living legend, but at the same time, she is treated as a bygone era.

The piece is a 60-year-old female killer character that has never been seen in Korea or Hollywood, and it is also unusual for a female actress in her 60s to take the lead role in a commercial film.Lee Hye-young abandons the sophisticated and modern image she has shown in recent dramas and presents a desperate character struggling to survive with intense action scenes.

Thanks to Lee Hye-young’s passionate performance, the film has already received international attention, receiving love calls from major overseas film festivals such as Berlin, Germany; Brussels, Belgium; and Beijing, China.After the film festival screening, foreign media outlets have been praising the film, comparing it to the leading actors of major Hollywood action films such as Keanu Reeves in “John Wick” and Liam Neeson in “Taken.”

O ‘Substance’ Demi Moore and Parallel Theory

Some say that this reaction reminds them of Demi Moore in ‘Substance’, which was released last year and was a long-running hit, attracting over 560,000 viewers in Korea alone.In ‘Substance’, Demi Moore played the role of a washed-up actress who indulges in her youth but makes an irreversible choice, and gave an ‘all-time passionate performance’ that made her 60s seem insignificant.

Thanks to this, the film was invited to major film festivals such as Cannes in France and Toronto in Canada, where it received rave reviews, and Demi Moore, who had a strong image as a ‘popcorn movie star’, won various awards including the Screen Actors Guild Award, Golden Globe Award, and Critics ‘Choice Award for Best Actress.

In addition to the commonality of acting transformation that breaks the frame of age, the commonality of creating chemistry that transcends generations while acting with a young actor born in the 1990s is also noticeable.If Demi Moore formed a bloody love-hate relationship with Margaret Qualley, born in 1993, in’ Substance ‘, Lee Hye-young will show a strange emotional line that cannot be defined in a word with Kim Sung-chul, born in 1991, who plays the mysterious young killer bullfight chasing after a piece in’ Breakthrough’.


Reporter Seungmi smlee@donga.com

This article is automatically translated using Google AI. If you notice any inaccuracies, please let us know at allkstar@donga.com.