From a drunk driving top star to a father with desperate paternal love, Jang Seung-jo deeply portrays the contrasting lives of two men.

The fifth installment of CJ ENM‘s drama project ‘Opening 2024’(O’PENing 2024), ‘The Son is Dead’, which aired on the 8th, is the story of a top actor who inevitably enters a virtual reality and receives the mission to ‘play the father and protect the child’, and who gradually comes to love his son with the heart of a real father and faces the shocking truth. Jang Seung-jo plays the role of Kang Tae-hwan, a top actor in South Korea, and goes back and forth between the life of a top star in reality and a middle-class father in virtual reality.

He called a taxi while drunk and fell asleep in the backseat, but when he opened his eyes, he was in the driver’s seat. Top star Kang Tae-hwan (Jang Seung-jo) was indicted for drunk driving. In order to hide the truth from the outside world before an important piece of work, Kang makes a deal with the prosecutor. He will play the father in a virtual reality program being developed by the Ministry of Justice on the condition that the indictment is dropped.

A father who raises his son alone with his bad leg. As a father who makes a living by paying for apartment security and looking after his son, Kang Tae-hwan gradually forgets the reality of being a top star and becomes absorbed in virtual reality. Time passes quickly in the virtual reality, and the child enters school and grows up. His affection for his son grows day by day, and he begins to worry about him even outside of the virtual reality. And at the moment his son dies, Kang‘s past sins are revealed.

He was the one who killed his son. Kang Tae-hwan lived the lives of the child and the child’s father, who died 20 years ago due to Kang Tae-hwan‘s drunk driving, in virtual reality. Only after living the life of the victim’s father in reverse did he realize the weight of the terrible sin he had committed. Jang Seung-jo‘s passionate performance crossed the line between the reality in the play and the virtual reality, and even awakened a sense of alertness to the reality outside the play. The tears that flowed with deep fatherly love conveyed the pain of the victim’s family beyond the screen and left a heavy aftertaste.


Top star Kang Tae-hwan and Kang Tae-hwan, a father in virtual reality. Jang Seung-jo powerfully portrayed their contrasting lives with detailed emotional acting. As Jang Seung-jo gradually became a father, the narrative of belated regret and sadness that he would experience piled up layer by layer, and the emotion of sobbing over the death of his child made it difficult to even breathe, and following that emotion to reality, it even aroused a heavy sense of alarm. At the end of the play, Jang Seung-jo, who became a father who endlessly runs through virtual reality to save his son, was filled with desperation itself, and made us feel the painful life of the victim who had to live his whole life with the pain of losing his son. Jang Seung-jo‘s passionate acting in a one-act play completely conveyed the message of the piece, leaving ‘My Son is Dead’ a well-made one-act play.

Meanwhile, Jang Seung-jo, who delivered in-depth acting that went back and forth between reality and fiction as well as the situations of two contrasting characters, recently confirmed his appearance in the Netflix original series ‘You Killed Me’. Expectations are high for the new transformation that Jang Seung-jo, who has built a unique character with delicate expressiveness in each work, will show.

Lee Seul-bi, Donga.com reporter misty82@donga.com