Yaaaaas! I was afraid we wouldn’t see Lee Jong-seok (While You Were Sleeping) before he was called away to the army, but it looks like we may get at least one more noona-romance from him. He’s being courted for tvN’s upcoming Romance Is a Supplement. But that’s not all, his potential noona-lover is Lee Na-young (Runaway Plan B)! What’s really cute about the Lee Jong-seok/Lee Na-young matchup is that Lee Jong-seok is rumored to be a huge fan of Lee Na-young. Apparently, he’s memorized her entire filmography, and sometimes practices his acting by watching her works.
Getting back to the meat of today’s news, Romance Is a Supplement tells the story of bookmakers in a world where people rarely read books. In the setting of a traditional book publishing company, the romance between Lee Jong-seok and Lee Na-young unfolds. He will be the youngest-in-company-history editor-in-chief who is a coldly strict perfectionist when it comes to work, but a warmly passionate man when it comes to people and relationships.
His character description says that he has such a busy schedule teaching his students that he’s rarely in the office, making some people at the company to gossip that he’s an editor-in-chief only in name. However, he’s the type of man who takes responsibility to fulfill his duties perfectly, and he truly is an example of how age does not necessarily correlate with capability.
Lee Na-young plays a woman who was once a rising star, but now is an unemployed divorcee. In her past, she entered a top university, and even before she graduated, she was recruited by a famous advertisement company as a college student copywriter, and she went on to win a grand prize for her work. Then, she married her boyfriend of three years, but it didn’t work out. As the drama begins, she dreams of being employed, but she’s too overqualified, which intimidates her potential employers. So she hides her educational background and enters Lee Jong-seok’s publishing company as a temp worker by pretending to be a high school dropout.
The other reason why this is big news is because Lee Na-young hasn’t been in dramaland since 2010. Ever since her quiet marriage to Won Bin and subsequent pregnancy, she’s been keeping a low profile. She did shoot a film Beautiful Days in 2017, but it still hasn’t been released. It’s also been a year since we’ve seen Lee Jong-seok, but he is supposed to appear in a short two-episode SBS drama called Death Song soon.
I Need Romance and Discovery of Romance writer Jung Hyun-jung and Life on Mars PD Lee Jung-hyo are working together to bring us this new project. Romance Is a Supplement is slated to be broadcast in the first half of next year on tvN.