SEOUL– Actress Cho Yi-hyun said Thursday she immersed herself so deeply in her character in the latest coming-of-age zombie thriller “All of Us Are Dead” that even her personality seemed to change.
Cho took the role of Nam-ra, the arrogant and studious class president who rarely talks with other classmates. When the school was hit by a mysterious zombie virus, she happens to be one of the few students who survives and struggles to lead the group out of the mayhem.
“Nam-ra is a very lonely girl who has no friends at school. She distances herself from other classmates, using in-ear headphones,” Cho said in an online interview. “She responds rationally to urgent situations based on logical judgment. I tried to express her attitude in a colder way.”
Cho said she thinks the loneliness and smartness makes Nam-ra different from other students. As the smartest and most rational person in the class, Nam-ra tries to remain cool-headed and sizes up the situation in a logical way, while others lose their nerve facing a swarm of zombies.
After months of living as Nam-ra in “All of Us Are Dead,” the 21-year actresses admitted that her personality based on the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) had changed to a thinker, known as “T,” from a feeler, or “F.”
“I usually take out one of my characteristics to portray a fictional character. Nam-ra is definitely part of me,” she said. “But after ‘All of Us Are Dead,’ I became more logic-based, like Nam-ra. I experience this kind of personality change every time I finish a project.”
But Cho, who began her acting career with a short web drama in 2017, said it was difficult for her to express Nam-ra in the latter part of the 12-part series, as she is bitten and becomes a hybrid zombie, called an “immune” zombie.
An immune zombie has greater force and speed than a human but is able to control the urge to attack humans. Nam-ra plays a role in protecting her surviving friends from regular zombies and helping them reach a safer place.
“Nam-ra becomes a half-human and half-zombie. It’s a new character that I haven’t seen in any zombie films and shows,” she said. “After hours of life-and-death struggling, Nam-ra learns friendship and cooperation, but, at the same time, she feels an impulse to eat humans and tries to control it.”
For the larger-than-expected popularity of “All of Us Are Dead,” Cho thanked fans across the world for loving the series and her character.
Released on Jan. 28, the series retained the No. 1 position on Netflix’s weekly viewership chart for the second consecutive week. It also became the streamer’s fifth most-watched non-English TV program in cumulative hours of streaming, posting 361 million hours just in the first 10 days of release.
“Thank you to all the people who love ‘All of Us Are Dead,” she said. “It’s amazing that a Korean-language TV series is viewed and beloved by people all around the world.”
Source: Yonhap News Agency