I’m happy to see child actress Park Shi-eun get another role so soon after her stint on KBS’s Seven Day Queen: She will join the cast of tvN’s upcoming Criminal Minds as Lee Jun-ki’s first love, although given that her role will likely appear only in flashbacks, I’m assuming she’ll be more like a guest star, rather than a recurring or starring role.
Park Shi-eun was adorably plucky as the younger counterpart to Park Min-young’s Chae-kyung in Seven Day Queen, and opposite Baek Seung-hwan who played the young Lee Yeok, the young couple’s puppy romance got me fully invested in a love story that is guaranteed to end in tears. Not sure whether I should thank her for that. But on the other hand, because of her performance in the fusion sageuk, I’m looking forward to her appearance in Criminal Minds in spite of my reservations about adding a first love backstory to Lee Jun-ki’s profiler character.
For someone so young (she was born in 2001), Park Shi-eun has amassed a pretty impressive list of credits, which includes The Good Wife, Signal, and Six Flying Dragons, the last of which coincidentally also featured Baek Seung-hwan as a young Moo-hyul. It looks like she has a bright future ahead, and I’ll definitely be following her career trajectory, hoping it will replicate previous successful child-actors-turned-leads.
Criminal Minds, the upcoming remake of the American procedural about profilers catching serial killers, will premiere in July in tvN’s brand-new Wednesday-Thursday slot.