If Dramabeans had presses, I’d be yelling, “Stop the presses!” Lee Na-young (Beautiful Days, Runaway Plan B) has confirmed that she will star in tvN’s 2019 rom-com, Romance Is a Bonus Book. The drama will be Lee Na-young’s first in nine years. Lee Jong-seok (While You Were Sleeping, V.I.P.) will co-star, in what is likely to be his last project before serving his compulsory military service.
Lee Na-young will play Kang Dan-yi, a once-successful copywriter who reached soaring heights early in her career but, at the start of the drama, finds herself unemployed and overqualified for every job she applies for. Looking to make a fresh start in life and desperate for a job, she decides to hide her educational background. She masquerades as a high-school dropout and lands a job at Lee Jong-seok’s publishing company. Since this is a rom-com, there are sure to be romantic hijinks between Dan-yi and Cha Eun-ho (Lee Jong-seok’s character).
Lee Na-young has kept a notoriously low profile the past several years—to the point that I’m most familiar with her older films and coffee ads. Over the past decade, she’s only chosen to appear in a handful of acting roles so I’m curious and excited to see what it was about Romance Is a Bonus Book that enticed her back to dramas.
Romance Is a Bonus Book is set to premiere in the first half of next year with director Lee Jung-hyo (Life on Mars, The Good Wife) and writer Jung Hyun-jung (Five Enough, Discovery of Romance, I Need Romance series) joining forces for the drama. The duo previously worked together on OnStyle’s Because It’s the First Time and tvN’s I Need Romance 2.