Apple TV+ Korean horror series Dr Brain’s director and cast talk about working with dummy corpses and K-dramas’ global appeal
- The director of the Apple TV+ series, Kim Jee-woon, and its stars Lee Sun-kyun, Park Hee-soon and Seo Ji-hye open up about the webtoon adaptation
- Kim reveals the directors whose brains he’d like to be wired up to like Dr Brain’s lead character, and they comment on the global rise of Korean drama series
It began most obviously with Mr Spock. Arguably, the inscrutable Vulcan’s best party trick was the mind meld, which allowed him to read the thoughts of others (and avert yet another catastrophe for the USS Enterprise).
But for Kim, all that was part of the fun. “I was instantly drawn to the webtoon because I was intrigued by the story the protagonist uncovers, before solving a mystery by looking into other people’s brains,” says Kim during a video call from Seoul.
“And I thought I could add more layers to the narrative to turn it into a story of personal growth. So I tried to have him understand his flaws by putting himself into others’ shoes through brain scans and learning what he lacks.”
That protagonist is Parasite star Lee Sun-kyun, who plays Dr Sewon Koh. Having apparently lost his wife and son in murderous circumstances, the usually taciturn, dispassionate Koh becomes sufficiently desperate for information about their fates that he wires up his head to various informants, living and recently deceased.