Interview: Twice's Dahyun takes on debut role with peculiar imagination

Korea Herald

03-03-2025

How idol-turned-actor turned mediocre teen romance into method-acting playground
South Korea's entertainment industry thrives on crossover talent. K-pop idols routinely parlay their camera-ready charisma into acting careers, bringing built-in fanbases to productions as they test their skills.
It's a process not without pitfalls: Such career pivots are often met with a deeply skeptical public, notoriously unforgiving of novice missteps. Even today's screen heavyweights — Lee Ji-eun (better known as her stage name IU), Doh Kyung-soo and Im Si-wan — weathered critical drubbings early on.
All of which makes Dahyun's path to the screen all the more intriguing. The member of K-pop powerhouse Twice has bypassed the typical progression.
Other singers with acting ambitions have used small-budget web series, supporting roles on TV and indie projects as a sort of low-pressure training ground. But Dahyun has landed squarely in a lead role for a commercial release — "You Are the Apple of My Eye," a remake of the beloved 2011 Taiwanese romance that hit theaters Feb. 21.
"There's this overwhelming sense of gratitude," she tells a group of reporters at a cafe in Seoul's Samcheong-dong, Thursday.
"Just seeing it on screen feels surreal. When I was little, my mom used to ask if she'd ever see me in a movie. This moment means everything — not just because it's my first solo venture, but because acting has been my dream for so long. I prepared so intensely for this opportunity."
The film, set in the early 2000s in Chuncheon, Gangwon Province, follows classmates Seon-ah and Jin-woo through their high school days. Seon-ah's the class star — beautiful, smart, and universally adored; Jin-woo's a class clown who spends his days goofing off with friends. When Seon-ah helps Jin-woo with his studies, they develop a relationship that hovers somewhere between friends and something more.
Even after parting ways for college, they maintain their ambiguous connection through calls and occasional meetings, neither quite brave enough to define what they are. Years tick by, feelings remain unspoken, and what they once cherished slowly dissolves into memory.
Bustling with teenage antics, "You Are the Apple of My Eye" offers a lighthearted portrayal of juvenile buffoonery with an unresolved "will-they-won't-they" tension at its core. It's a film of little substance and plenty of chutzpah that leans heavily on early-2000s nostalgia to patch its many shortcomings.
Dahyun's lead fits the film — a simple leading role for a simple movie. As an idealized class queen admired by everyone, Seon-ah exists more as a type than a fully fleshed-out character and is never examined beyond her pristine surface.
Within these inherent limitations, Dahyun delivers a competent debut performance with a number of genuinely affecting moments.
"I literally became Seon-ah," Dahyun says with gleeful conviction. "I would constantly think, 'What would Seon-ah do here? How would she phrase this?' It seeped into everything."
Dahyun launches into a detailed account of her character's unscripted backstory —information absent from the film but critical to her process.
"Before shooting, the director and I had extensive conversations about Seon-ah's history," she says, as if detailing the research for a biopic rather than a teen romance.
"Her mother runs a vegetable store, her late father was a police officer, and she's the eldest child with younger siblings. Because her parents are busy, she has to take care of her brother and sister, which explains why she's always scolding Jin-woo."
These elaborate biographical contrivances — unbeknownst to anyone actually watching the film — apparently reached melodramatic proportions.
"There's also this narrative where Seon-ah's dad was brutally attacked and died before her eyes," Dahyun explains. "From that place of trauma, I understood why she couldn't bear to see someone she cared about get hurt. I needed that emotional foundation."
She consciously avoided watching the original film, preferring to build her character from scratch. For emotional scenes, she translated Seon-ah's academic disappointment into terms she could relate to.
"I thought about it like bombing a performance on stage — something I've trained my whole life for. What if one mistake ruined everything? What if I were injured and couldn't perform again?
"For Seon-ah, studying was her whole world. When I framed it that way, the tears came naturally."
So naturally, in fact, that Dahyun continued crying long after the director called cut.
Despite the demands of her debut, Dahyun's schedule keeps on rolling without a break. Last year's filming coincided with Twice's world tour, and she has already committed to two more projects — the film "Run To You" and the drama "Love Me" — all while juggling her activities as a member of Twice.
"The pressure is there," she says. "But my goal is to find joy in both acting and performing with Twice. That's what matters most."