For actors Park Bo-young and Park Jin-young, ‘Our Unwritten Seoul’ was the story of a lifetime

Actor Park Bo-young felt such an unusually strong pull toward the script of the recently ended tvN’s series “Our Unwritten Seoul” that she voiced her desire to be part of it even before its producer or a broadcaster had been confirmed, a move that she rarely makes when deciding on the next project.

She says the relatable and comforting plots of the script were the drama’s main charm, which co-star Park Jin-young also agreed on.

“For the first time ever, I wanted this project so badly that even if it wasn’t mine, I still wished it were,” she said in a recent interview with reporters at her agency, BH Entertainment, on June 26, explaining that she deeply hoped to make the project part of her filmography.

“I really didn’t want to miss out on this drama. When I first got the script, nothing had been decided yet, not the broadcaster nor the producer. But I just felt like this script wasn’t something I could let someone else have.”

Co-star Park Jin-young, who portrayed Lee Ho-su, shared a similar feeling during a recent interview with reporters on July 1. “At first, just reading the script brought me so much comfort. I think I had received the scripts up to episode six. While reading it, the character Ho-su kept lingering in my mind more and more as the story unfolded,” he said.

Produced by Park Shin-woo, who was behind the series “It’s Okay to Not Be Okay” (2020) and written by Lee Kang, who also penned the series “Youth of May” (2021), the 12-episode series wrapped on June 29. The story follows twin sisters, who are completely different except for their faces, swapping identities and through the process rediscover love and life.

The series ended on good notes, receiving an 8.4 percent viewership rating — considered strong for a cable drama — and also made Netflix’s global Top 10 list for non-English TV shows for five consecutive weeks.

In the series, Park Bo-young played both sisters, Yu Mi-ji and Yu Mi-rae. For the actor, such a dual role was not something unfamiliar as she had once tackled a similar challenge in the series “Oh My Ghost” (2015) 10 years ago. Still, she admitted this time felt especially daunting.

“Especially for ‘Our Unwritten Seoul,’ even before filming started, I kept wondering what kind of courage or confidence made me believe I could pull this off, and I got really scared,” she said.

“In my head, I could picture all of it so clearly and calculate how it should come out, but the actual result often didn’t match what I’d imagined. At times like that, I honestly just wanted to run away.”

She also shared that she approached the two characters by drawing from her own professional and personal lives — explaining that her friends and family saw Mi-rae as being more like her, while people she met through work tended to associate her with Mi-ji.

For actor Park Jin-young, the coming-of-age drama was his first project after finishing his mandatory military service in November last year.

Having been away from acting for over a year, Park admitted he felt a certain “anxiety” when stepping back onto set.

“I’d been away for about a year and a half, doing something completely different,” Park Jin-young said. “So even though acting was something I used to do, I started off without much certainty about myself. I kept worrying whether I might have lost my touch, and I wasn’t sure if what I was thinking was even right anymore. It really felt like I was starting from scratch.”

He credited his co-star Park Bo-young, along with the crew and producer, for creating an environment that helped him overcome his doubts.

One of the biggest challenges for Park was portraying Ho-su’s subtle hearing loss “naturally, almost like a habit.” In order to do so, he paid close attention to details, such as the way Ho-su pauses before speaking or talking more slowly than others.

“That borderline feeling was the hardest part for me,” he said. “It’s not something that can be expressed in an obvious or dramatic way, nor is it something that can be completely ignored.”

As the show came to a heartwarming close, Park Jin-young hopes the series is a part of people’s favorite memories of 2025.

“I hope that when people look back on the first half of 2025, like flipping through an old diary, this drama will be one of those memories they occasionally take out and remember as something that brought them comfort.”

BY KIM JI-YE [kim.jiye@joongang.co.kr]