Avid fans surround Moon Ok-gyeong after a performance, mostly young girls who beg for autographs and offer her flowers. Ok-gyeong, the character played by actress Jung Eun-chae, is the star of a gukgeuk troupe, a performer who thrills audiences with her musical portrayal of princes. The troupe performs a genre of traditional Korean opera in the folk song style known as pansori, derived from two Korean words, pan, referring to a place where people gather, and sori or song.
Jung plays this character in the historical k-drama Jeongnyeon: The Star Is Born. Produced by Studio Dragon, the story is set in the 1950s, shortly after the Korean War, when several all-female gukgeuk troupes performed and competed for enthusiastic audiences. At a time when women had fewer career options, performers in the Maeran geugeuk wholeheartedly embraced their own destiny, studying for years so they could master the craft and one day possibly live like real princes. Before Jung took the role of Maeran star Ok-gyeong she was not that familiar with pansori, an art form now considered an intangible Korean cultural asset.
“I had a chance to listen to pansori a few times through performances, but I didn’t know much about it,” she said. “The art form felt a bit difficult to approach and hard to enjoy in daily life.”
However, the more she learned about pansori the more she began to appreciate it.
“While preparing for Jeongnyeon: The Star is Born, I started to study sori (the sound and voice of pansori) and explore the world of pansori,” said Jung. “ I discovered that Korean traditional opera is much more modern and free in its expressions than I had thought, and I came to appreciate the beautiful depth of the genre. Listening to master pansori singers, I realized sori is more than just an old cultural art form—it embodies our history, filled with the lives and stories of people.”
Female gukgeuk performers act out a dramatic opera. Studio Dragon
Jung studied pansori for a whole year but she knew that was not enough.
“I spent a year immersed in it, from the preparation period before filming to the very end,” said Jung. “When you first hear sori, you’ll notice it is completely different from casual speech or singing. A single year was far too short to master pansori, as its depth can only be expressed through years of dedicated training. Still, learning it was a truly fresh and phenomenal experience.”
As an artist Ok-gyeong is drawn toward male roles, which allow her new ways to express herself.
“Moon Ok-gyeong is a character born with artistic talent,” said Jung. “However, she easily gets bored with mundane repetition and craves new stimuli and experiences. I think that’s why she took on male roles in Yeoseong Gukgeuk (female Korean traditional opera), which offered her a sense of novelty and freedom.”
Playing Ok-gyeong was a very different experience from her role in second season of Pachinko which aired earlier this year. The actress, who previously appeared in the dramas Your Honor, Anna, LUCA: The Beginning and The King: Eternal Monarch, plays Sunja’s timid sister-in-law Kyung-hee in both the first and second season of Pachinko. Kyung-hee is as shy and easy to read as Ok-gyeong is bold and complicated.
“I think there is no character we can approach easily,” said Jung. “I always try to understand a character by imagining their untold story and emotions—the parts that aren’t explicitly shown on screen or written into the script. When playing Kyung-hee in Pachinko, I tried to carefully understand a tragic character shaped by the circumstances of the time. For Ok-gyeong, I aimed to portray someone who is lonely despite being surrounded by admiration.”
In Jeongnyeon: The Star Is Born the performers stage several dramas within the drama, plays that are often no less dramatic than the conflicts and trials the performers face in real life. For Jung these breathtaking performances remain one of her best memories of filming the drama.
“Every scene of gukguek performances on stage comes to mind, “ she said. “Where I poured everything I had into sori, dancing, and acting. In particular, the final performance, The Fool and the Princess, was Ok-gyeong’s last and mine. It will remain a fond and heartwarming memory for a very long time.
Jeongnyeon: The Star Is Born is based on a Naver webtoon by Seo Ireh and Kim Yoon-hye. The Studio Dragon drama, which also stars Kim Tae-ri, Shin Ye-eun, Ra Mi-ran, Kim Yoon-hye and Woo-Da-vi, can be seen on Disney+ internationally and on Hulu in the U.S.
This story was originally published on forbes.com.