What Park Eun Bin Took Away From Her WONDERfools Character

Netflix’s The WONDERfools, starring Park alongside drama heartthrob Cha Eun Woo, is a superhero comedy set in a fictional 1999 Korean city where a group of self-described misfits accidentally acquire flawed, uncontrollable superpowers. In a group compared to “Korea’s Guardians of the Galaxy”, Park plays Eun Chae-ni, an angsty, terminally ill woman who (spoiler) dies at a rubbish dump in the first episode and (spoiler) wakes up with the ability to teleport and a heart that, let’s say, pumps slightly harder than most.

It somewhat of a departure from Woo Young-woo, the autistic savant attorney who made her a global name in 2022.

"I was so grateful and very happy to have met such an (smiles) energetic character," she says through translator Haley Jung. "I felt very lively, alive, and vivid." The role required a physical and comedic register she had not previously been asked to sustain at this scale, which begs the question of whether playing someone this chaotic is sustainable for someone who describes herself, without hesitation, as directly opposite.

"I think it is because I am such an introvert that I am able to really accumulate the intense amount of energy, and when I need it for a character like this, I can really explode it and create an intense power through her." The introversion, in other words, is not a limitation she works around. It is the engine. "It felt very cathartic," she adds. “And also I had a lot of fun.”

It was not every day she got approached with a script where the character departs the world immediately. "When my character dies in the first episode, I thought, how is the story going to unfold from there? It was because of that twist, this was actually the very first reason I was drawn to saying yes to this project."

For Park, the appeal of The WONDERfools extends beyond superpowers and slapstick. The series takes place in 1999, before smartphones and the endless churn of notifications that now define daily life. "The time we live in right now is way too fast," she reflects. The irony is not lost on her; the same interconnected world that allows Korean dramas to find global audiences has also made genuine isolation almost impossible. There is, she says, "a charm and almost a blessing" in being severed from the outside. In the closed-off city of Haesong, where the rest of the world feels comfortably far away, the show’s strange events are allowed to breathe. "In those times, we didn't have social media," she says. "You were a little bit disconnected from the rest of the world. And I think that's what makes this story possible."

Park Eun Bin On Thirty Years In The Industry And Questioning Herself

Park has been in the Korean entertainment industry since 1996, when she was discovered as a child model at the age of four. Her acting debut followed in 1998 with White Nights 3.98, but for much of her current fanbase, her breakthrough came with Extraordinary Attorney Woo, for which she won the coveted Grand Prize at the 59th Baeksang Arts Awards in 2023 . Extraordinary Attorney Woo itself spent 21 consecutive weeks in Netflix’s top 10 most-watched non-English series globally, per Variety.

(The WONDERfools is showing healthy progress on Netflix’s global charts as well, currently on its fifth consecutive week in the Top 10.)

None of this, she suggests, has produced anything resembling certainty. "There were definitely times when I would ask myself, am I really carved out to be an actor? There were times when I would constantly ask myself, 'Can I say that I’m also one of those people? Am I like that?’"

The answer, she says now, is yes, but it took not a little work to get there. “I found my talent to be persistence and patience. That is what allowed me to change all of these question marks that formed inside me into exclamation marks.”

The people she once measured herself against, she tells me, disappeared “one by one.” She is still here.

Park is reflective. “Honestly, there were many times when I didn’t enjoy acting. Sometimes I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing."

"However, I think sticking it out through all those years and spending the time finding myself, I got to know more as time went on. I got to meet wonderful projects along the way, and I think I’m still in the process of expanding my capabilities.”

What Park Eun Bin Said About Extraordinary Attorney Woo Season 2

The question everyone is waiting for arrives near the end of the twenty minutes.

WONDERfools reunites Park with Director Yoo In-sik, who previously directed Extraordinary Attorney Woo. There have been multiple unconfirmed reports that Season 2 of the breakout hit is in early pre-production. Park, hitherto a fount of articulate thoughts, is suddenly coy.

“If we were to do a second season,” she smiles, not positioning herself outside the project, “you need a definite and a very strong, driven answer to the question: what is the story for? Why is it being told? And I feel like unless you have a very concrete answer to that question, this is something that is very difficult to go ahead with.”

“As much as I hold this character near and dear to my heart, I have a very strong drive to wanting to protect this character as well.”

The WONDERfools, starring Park Eun Bin and Cha Eun Woo is streaming now on Netflix.