‘Reply 1988′ actor says ‘lucky’ to work with actress Hwang Jung-eum

Actress Hwang Jung-eum and actor Ryu Jun-yeol. (Yonhap)

SEOUL (Yonhap) — Actor Ryu Jun-yeol, who made his big TV break as the friend-zoned male protagonist in the hit TV series “Reply 1988″ last year, said Wednesday he is feeling lucky with the upcoming romantic comedy series “Lucky Romance.”

“Normally, I get really nervous around senior actors, but actress Hwang Jung-eum made me feel at home from the start,” Ryu said at a news conference promoting the MBC series in western Seoul. “I feel lucky to be on this show.”

In the TV adaptation of the namesake web cartoon series, a superstition-obsessed programmer (Hwang) falls in love with the cool-headed CEO of her game company (Ryu).

Actor Ryu Jun-yeol poses for photos at a press conference discussing his upcoming show “Lucky Romance” at MBC in Seoul on May 25, 2016. (Yonhap)

Ryu and Hwang are two of South Korea’s most in-demand actors at the moment.

“Reply 1988,” a tvN series about a girl’s coming-of-age in the 1980s, launched Ryu and his partner Hyeri of the girl group Girl’s Day to overnight stardom last year. And Hwang, a former Sugar member, gained legitimacy as an actress with her starring role in “Kill Me, Heal Me” in 2015, when she played a first-year psychiatry resident treating a wealthy man suffering from a dissociative identity disorder.

Strangely enough, the two have swapped partners from their previous hits for the upcoming Wednesday-Thursday night series. The pair will compete with Hyeri and actor Ji Sung, also from “Kill Me, Heal Me,” whose show “The Entertainer” has been airing in the same time slot on the rival channel SBS. But Ryu said he barely minds the coincidence.

“I don’t really feel competitive. We have actually been cheering each other on,” he said. “But I do tell Hyeri to look after her health.”

Actress Hwang Jung-eum poses for photos at a press conference discussing his upcoming show “Lucky Romance” at MBC in Seoul on May 25, 2016. (Yonhap)

“Lucky Romance” is also Hwang’s first TV series in three months. The “Pretty Woman” actress had taken a brief hiatus after marrying a golfer in February.

Hwang said she could barely wait to get back to work but had actually hoped to star in a melodrama after watching “Descendants of the Sun,” a mega-hit series that took South Korea and China by storm earlier this year.

“I was so hooked on ‘Descendants of the Sun’ that I wanted to take on a melodrama,” she said. “But no one has tried to cast me in one since I got married. I did, however, get many calls to be in a romantic comedy so I chose the best one out of them.”

The TV series has not stayed entirely true to the relatively short web cartoon series, producers said.

“Being loyal to the original would have yielded two to four episodes max,” producer Kim Kyeong-hui said. “So besides the fact that the female protagonist believes in superstition, we have taken some liberty and added a lot of things.”

The occupation of the leading male character, for instance, has been changed from a real estate owner to a company CEO.

The producer also stressed the series is about how a woman who holds fast to “invisible, immaterial beliefs” learns to trust a man “who is right in front of her.”

“The two actors were our No. 1 choices, so we’re extremely thrilled to be working with them,” Kim said.

“Lucky Romance” premieres at 10 p.m. on Wednesday on MBC.

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