Hyun Bin returns to dramaland with split personality

by girlfriday

Woohoo, Hyun Bin is returning to dramaland! As a romantic lead with a split… personality…? Okay, I don’t know how I feel about that. The new SBS drama is called Hyde, Jekyll, Me, and is preparing for a January 2015 broadcast. It’s an adaptation of a popular webtoon that began in 2011 called Dr. Jekyll Is Mr. Hyde, a romantic comedy twist on the classic The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Or yunno, it’s Me, Myself & Irene. I’m just going to go out on a limb and guess that a rom-com Jekyll and Hyde means that Hyde is a jerkface, not a murderer, yeah? Let’s hold onto that shred of hope, shall we?

Hyun Bin has signed on to star, after a recent kerfuffle in the last week about him possibly signing on to headline (and vehemently denying) the drama Kill Me, Heal Me, the OTHER romantic comedy drama about a hero with multiple-personality disorder in development over at MBC. Um, now I see why there was such a hubbub, because he got offers to star in two nearly identical dramas. Oy. May the better dissociative-identity-disordered man win, I guess.

Hyde, Jekyll, Me is a 20-episode drama that comes from PD Jo Young-kwang of 49 Days and Yawang, and writer Kim Ji-woon of Alice in Cheongdam-dong. (Writers Kim Young-hyun and Park Sang-hyun, the team behind Queen Seon-deok and Tree With Deep Roots, are attached as well, but only in a creator-producer capacity.)

Hyun Bin will play a third-generation chaebol and director of an amusement park called Wonderland. He’s a curious character who doesn’t drink or gamble, which is fine… but then he also doesn’t drive, exercise, leave the house, or stay out all night. Does he also wear sparkly tracksuits and look down on poor people? Because I think we’ve done quirky chaebol with issues once already.

He also won’t date or marry, and he lives with the trauma from a gruesome childhood accident. As a result, he suffers from multiple personality disorder, with two totally different personas residing in the same body. The classic Jekyll/Hyde types are flipped: Jekyll is the cold, prickly one, described as the “world’s worst man.” And Hyde is the sweet, innocent one, the “world’s nicest man.”

The rom-com setup is basically that one woman falls in love with him (er, them?) and finds herself in a love triangle with his two personalities. Okay, that totally takes the cake as the strangest love triangle ever. I can see why Hyun Bin chose the project as his army-comeback drama, since he gets to showcase his acting chops as two characters in one story. I just wonder if it means we should be rooting for the the nice one to prevail, or just rooting for the heroine to love both Hyun Bins. Mmmmmmmm… two Hyun Bins… *spends rest of day in gutter*

Hyde, Jekyll, Me follows Pinocchio (which follows She’s So Lovable) on Wednesdays and Thursdays starting in January.

Via E Daily, IS Plus

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