Beauty Inside

Back at the gym today and needed something new to start after (finally) finishing You're All Surrounded. I'd watched 5 minutes of the next episode of Strongest Deliveryman but stopped. Too depressing (suicidal people + bridges). I've been sad enough myself lately. Don't need to add to that. The only thing I already had downloaded that didn't look like it would be depressing (let's face it...the Midnight Diner stories are interesting but they aren't exactly cheerful...) was the Beauty Inside.

Bonus for having Lee Min Ki (playing the male lead, Seo Do-Jae, a chaebol airline director who is unable to recognise faces) from Because This is My First Life and also Ahn Jae-Hyeon (even though I just saw him in You're All Surrounded--here he's a friend of the female lead). The female lead is Seo Hyun-Jin, playing Han Se-gye, a Korean Wave Hallyu star, with a problem. For a week (?) every month she transforms into an entirely different person physically--male, female, young, old. Not exactly an easy thing to hide or live through.

This show is a remake of a 2015 movie. Well, not a remake exactly, as it seems to be very different as far as I can tell. In the movie The Beauty Inside, the one who transforms is a guy and it looks like (from the credits alone) he transforms into a lot more iterations...including Park Seo Joon. So, yeah, will have to see if I can find that movie sometime to watch.

Anyway, back to this one. Se-gye is known as a difficult actress because she's always running away. Everyone thinks she's a diva or has some kind of secret she's trying to hide (like a kid out of wedlock or that she dates tons of men, when she's never even had a relationship before due to her condition). There's a hint that Do-jae's condition occurred after an accident and it's more than likely (given this is a Kdrama) that it's from the first time Se-gye transformed when she was 20 on holiday in Europe. Confused at waking up an old woman, she was wandering the streets of an unfamiliar city and nearly got run over by a car. She was pushed out of the way at the last minute by a man who got hit in her place. I'm sure we can all guess who that was. I mean, really, is there any doubt?

So, after the first episode...I'd say it's looking promising. I don't think it'll be too surprising in any way given the premise and what they've laid out so far, but I like the actors. It looks like it will have a decent amount of humour. The characters are sympathetic --  both can come across to people that don't know them as not being very nice but they both have their reasons. Lee Min Ki is deadpan as always. I've downloaded all the episodes on my phone so I'll have them when we go on our trip to Florida on Friday.

Edit: Watched some episodes on the flights back and forth to the US and am now on episode ten. I am enjoying this one overall. The angst to getting them to be a couple wasn't too drawn out, which was good and made sense for the characters -- they're both people that were desperate to both love and be loved. There's a lot more about the second leads than I thought there would be -- in fact, I think a lot of the last episodes will deal with that. Ahn Jae-Hyeon's character Ryu Eun-Ho and Lee Da-Hee's character Kang Sa-Ra (Do-Jae's step-sister) have their own troubles ahead of them with a number of obstacles. Thought it a bit odd that one of the obstacles is that Eun-Ho has always wanted to be a priest. Feels a bit out of nowhere and, honestly, he (and his character)...well, you just can't picture him as a priest.

The show hasn't yet had the big reveal about Do-Jae's accident being related to Se-gye and I'm not sure exactly how that will wind up worked in when it's now gearing up for a big battle between some bad guy corporate types and Do-Jae.

Anyway, while I am liking it, I also can't say that it's completely enthralled me. Like, I enjoy watching it, but I'm not jonesing for the next episode either. That could be partly because of being busy while on holiday, I dunno. We'll see.