Son Ye-jin The Scandal row: Why one must stop moral policing married actors

Actor Son Ye-jin's casting in Netflix's adult-rated The Scandal has triggered scrutiny over her marital and parental status. The reaction has shifted attention from the role itself to the persistent policing of women actors' choices.

In Short

• Netflix's The Scandal stars Son Ye-jin in a Joseon-era adult drama
• Online reactions questioned her choice because she is married and a mother
• Son Ye-jin said Hyun Bin helped her rehearse lines for the series

Son Ye-jin is a renowned Korean entertainment star. You might best recall her from Crash Landing on You, the breakout K-drama that continues to be one of the most-watched shows worldwide. She also happens to be married (to Hyun Bin). And yes, she is also a mother. And, according to a section of social media, that apparently means she should think twice before taking on an adult-rated role.

The conversation surfaced around Netflix’s upcoming Korean drama The Scandal, which stars Son Ye-jin alongside Ji Chang-wook and NANA. Set in the late Joseon era, the eight-episode series follows a dangerous game of seduction, manipulation and forbidden desire among the upper classes. Netflix has classified the drama as an adult title, with a 19+ rating in South Korea.

Predictably, some online reactions have focused not just on what Son Ye-jin’s character does in the series, but on the fact that the actor playing her is married to Hyun Bin and has a young child. The implication is familiar: marriage changes the rules for women actors. Motherhood changes them further. Roles involving intimacy, desire or sexuality are suddenly expected to pass through an imaginary morality filter that has little to do with acting.

Son Ye-jin, however, has never suggested that becoming a wife or mother meant putting her career in a different box. In fact, her own story about making The Scandal offers a rather amusing response to the online debate. She revealed during No Other Choice press that Hyun Bin helped her rehearse her lines for the series. “I asked my husband to run lines with me. The Scandal was the first time he ever ran lines with me,” Son Ye-jin said.

She kept asking him to rehearse with her, eventually prompting Hyun Bin to joke, “I’m gonna end up memorising it myself.” The actor apparently got more involved than he had anticipated. Son Ye-jin recalled that Hyun Bin later met the producer of The Scandal and joked, “It’s killing me trying to help her practise her lines.” But honestly, this is beside the point.

For an actor to be able to choose what role they are comfortable portraying is a matter of choice, regardless of their marital status. To suggest that just because an actor is married, she should get a written permission from her husband to be able to participate in 19+ rated drama is undermining her individuality.

And this is hardly a new direction for Son Ye-jin. Since making her debut in the early 2000s, she has built a career across romance, melodrama, thrillers and more mature dramas. She became one of South Korea’s defining romance stars through films such as The Classic and A Moment to Remember, before taking on increasingly complicated adult characters in projects including Secret Garden, Something in the Rain and Thirty-Nine.

Her career has never been built around playing the same version of herself. The Scandal takes that progression into another period of her career. Directed by Jung Ji-woo, the drama is inspired by the same literary material that previously informed the 2003 Korean film Untold Scandal, itself a Joseon-set adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ 18th-century novel Dangerous Liaisons.

The new series places Son Ye-jin at the centre of a story about power, desire and social reputation. She plays Lady Cho, a woman from Joseon’s elite who becomes involved in a wager surrounding Jo-won, played by Ji Chang-wook, and Hui-yeon, played by NANA. The adult rating is therefore not a surprise add-on to the story. Desire is baked into the premise.

What is more interesting is the response to Son Ye-jin herself.

Korean entertainment has long had a complicated relationship with female celebrities and the idea of “respectability”. Women stars are often expected to evolve into carefully managed versions of themselves as they age. Marriage can reinforce that expectation; motherhood can make it even more pronounced. A male actor can continue playing a lover, adulterer, seducer or sexually charged character without audiences necessarily treating the role as incompatible with his real-life identity. A woman can face questions about whether she should still be doing the same thing. This mentality is not unique to Korea. Globally patriarchy has lived and thrived on undermining agency to women- both on and off-screen.

Son Ye-jin is hardly the first actress to encounter that expectation. But The Scandal arrives at an interesting point in her career: she is no longer being presented as the young romantic heroine audiences first knew. She is an established actor taking on a mature, adult role. That should not require a disclaimer.

There is also an odd contradiction in the argument. If an actor’s marital status determines which fictional relationships they can portray, where does that leave the profession? Should married actors stop playing unmarried characters? Should parents avoid playing characters who have no children?

Fiction has always allowed actors to inhabit lives that are not their own. That is rather the point.

And Son Ye-jin’s decision to appear in The Scandal does not require validation from Hyun Bin either. His willingness to help her rehearse is a nice glimpse into their marriage, but it is not a permission slip.

As The Scandal heads to Netflix on September 18, audiences can decide whether Son Ye-jin, Ji Chang-wook and NANA make the period romance work, whether the chemistry lands and whether the adaptation earns its adult rating. For Son Ye-jin, The Scandal is another role. It need not become a referendum on her marriage.

- Ends