[INTERVIEW] Yoon Yeo-jung - Part 1

10: 10Asia is an web-based magazine. Do you use the Internet a bit?
Yoon Yeo-jung (Yoon): Not at all. I have to ask this article to be printed out too.

10: Then I guess you probably don't know that when you type in your name as the keyword on the Internet, the phrase 'reason for divorce' pops up alongside it too.
Yoon: Oh! Really? So people are finally figuring out why I got a divorce after more than ten years that it happened? (laugh)

10: Do you usually watch a lot of TV?
Yoon: I watch it a lot. I'm amazed when I see people who don't watch TV. I can't even read for that long now because my eyes hurt. I'm the type that has to finish a book in one go, cover to cover, but it's become very difficult to do that. I recently did finish a book by Murakami Haruki without taking a break.

10: You need to be ready in a different sort of way to appear on talk show "The Knee-Drop Guru". Host Kang Ho-dong asks a lot of personal questions and he's not indirect about it either.
Yoon: That's why I was hesitant to go on it in the beginning. I had never appeared on a variety show before. It really was my first time ever! And when I was still trying to make up my mind, director E J-yong told me to ask Lee Mi-sook and Ko Hyun-joung since they'd already been on the show. They all said I'd be alright. And the questions they had originally sent me were very normal and sounded elegant. They hadn't included the question about my divorce either. I thought about it for two weeks before going on the show.

10: But Kang didn't ask any so-called elegant questions, did he? (laugh)
Yoon: Man, Kang is a very smart person. He would somehow make me start talking about things I hoped he wouldn't ask me. What could I do. I got swayed by him completely and lost my energy. (laugh) And then I ended up taking down my wall completely and went on and on. I don't remember what I said.

10: Were there any surprising questions?
Yoon: The questions themselves weren't surprising or anything. It was rather, how should I put it, his skill of how he asks the question... he would just slip it in somehow. It's amazing. He isn't Kang Ho-dong for no reason. And his questions weren't disturbing either, not one bit. I actually felt bad for him because it seemed like I had chatted away. I'll have to see the show when it airs to realize what I said.

10: I think you must've felt the same way with "Actresses". You don't know what would have been included or cut for the final edit so I think you must've felt different before and after the screening.
Yoon: Man, I had been so curious. But I giggled so much even before the movie started. So much that [Lee] Mi-sook and I said to ourselves that we're enjoying this too much. We all couldn't remember what we had said while filming the movie, so Mi-sook was really loud while watching it because she kept asking what she had just said in it. (laugh)

10: All six of you got credit as screenwriters for the movie. How did you come up with the story?
Yoon: Many parts of the scenario were from actual occurences that the director had remembered. And I was having dinner one day when a drunk person came up to me saying, "I'm such a big fans of yours, Yeo Woon-kye!" and kept asking for an autograph. (laugh) So I said that I'm sorry but I can't because I'm not her, but that got included in the movie.

10: You all probably have sides to you that you don't want to reveal to the public as actresses so I think you were all very brave to take on this movie.
Yoon: We all just trusted E so much. (laugh) Of course, I don't have anything to lose. And there's no point in trying to hide things. The whole world still knows. The more you try to hide something, the better they find out about it. Of course, there is one thing that I am disappointed about in E. He cut of what Lee Mi-sook said about divorce while leaving all of our lines in. And do you know why he did that? Lee is E's ideal type of woman. (laugh)

10: Well, this is still a shoot for a film and when you know that everything will be recorded, I think an actress can decide between two options -- to continuously calculate or just let go completely.
Yoon: I let go. Because there's no use in trying to calculate and it just makes you look more weird. I've been calculative before, several times in the past, but it didn't really change things for me. (laugh) I know that I'd rather just be myself even if I do regret it later on, than being calculative and regretting not being myself then either. I also have bad eyesight so I don't really know where the camera is either. I think the younger actresses like Ko Hyun-joung were much more brave.

10: But don't actors sometimes have the confidence that they can appear as a certain type of person if they act like it?
Yoon: Of course and I was like that too at one point. How could I say I wasn't. And I would say cool things that I'd heard from elsewhere. But it's all gibberish. (laugh)

Editor in Chief : Beck Una one@10asia.co.kr
Photographer : Chae ki-won ten@10asia.co.kr
Editor : Jessica Kim jesskim@asiae.co.kr, Lee Ji-Hye seven@10asia.co.kr