As Yoon Eun Hye enters the eighth year of her acting career, she looks back at the days when she first entered Hallyu, after leaving the music industry and the girl group Baby VOX, where she was a member for almost six year.
“When I was younger, I was very careful about everything because I was afraid of creating misunderstandings. But now I’ve shed all those anxieties, and I feel much freer than before”, she recalls.
Yoon Eun Hye says she feels more confident about herself, now that she is entering her thirties and becomes more established in TV drama. Her latest TV drama, MBC’s “I Miss You” was a turning point for her. Yoon’s character in the drama is a woman who was sexually molested as a child and exhausted all efforts to bury her memories from the past. She said she initially struggled with the complexity of the character’s psychological issues, and found the experience so draining that she ended up in the hospital from fatigue and exhaustion.
Viewers, however, responded positively to her performance after immersing herself fully in the role. She was able to overcome cynical critics who had previously questioned the limits of her acting ability, garnering overwhelming positive reviews along the way.
“I’ve always wanted to play the kind of roles that were suitable for my age,” Yoon Eun Hye says. “The reason I’ve been looking forward to turning 30 so quickly is because I always expected it would open up a broader range of roles.”
Meanwhile, her short film “The Knitting” was part of the Busan International Film Festival last year, and the decision to challenge herself further by taking up film directing has helped her acting.
“I used to become very sensitive when I worked on projects, because I felt so personally responsible for whatever work I was engaged in, and this may have made life harder for those working with me,” she said. “But directing a film with a whole production crew made me think that I may have been mistaken in behaving like that. I realized that I need to be more flexible in how I approach things, and that helped me feel more at ease and go more with the flow this time.”
Despite only recently having wrapped up her latest production, she is already thinking about her next project. She said her confidence has been boosted by all the positive reviews she has received and now she wants to show audiences what she is really capable of.
Yoon Eun Hye says she wants to experience so many things, “because that enlarges and improves you as a person.”
Also published on Korea.com.
