EXO’s Suho (Star of the Universe) and Ha Yeon-soo (Legendary Witches) have been cast to headline a new romance drama called Rich Man, a Korean remake of the J-drama Rich Man, Poor Woman. Is that really the title? How… literal. The series has been picked up for simultaneous broadcast on cable network MBN and streaming platform Dramax, and premieres in May.
The original Japanese drama aired on Fuji TV in 2012, and as you might have guessed, it’s a love story between a filthy rich man and a poor woman. Suho has been cast to play the young geeeeenius programmer and CEO of the massively successful tech company Next One. He sounds like the standard prickly, handsome, wealthy drama hero, except that he has prosopagnosia, or face blindness, which prevents him from recognizing the face of the woman he loves.
Ha Yeon-soo will play an endlessly optimistic young woman who is unemployed and has “a memory like AlphaGo.” She applies for a job at the hero’s company, which is how they’ll meet. Also joining the cast is Oh Chang-seok (Defendant) as Next One’s co-founder and vice president with a mysterious side, and Kim Ye-won (Revolutionary Love) as Oh Chang-seok’s younger sister and gallery curator.
I haven’t seen the original, but it sounds like a light workplace romance akin to I’m Not a Robot without the robots. The casting stories are promising a bickering romance, so there’s definitely potential for some rom-com hijinks in there. Rich Man will be penned by writer Hwang Jo-yoon of Twelve Men in a Year and the movies Rampant, Memoir of a Murderer, Masquerade, and Old Boy, and directed by PD Min Doo-shik of web dramas My Only Love Song and Click Your Heart.
It’ll air on Wednesdays and Thursdays beginning May 9.