I always appreciate it when a drama features a truly strange character, and I have a feeling this drama will give us two. KBS’s upcoming fantasy rom-com Perfume has released several stills of leads Shin Sung-rok (An Empress’s Dignity) and Go Won-hee (Your House Helper), who will play a designer allergic to the world and an up-and-coming rookie model who moonlights as a housekeeper.
I remember when this show was first announced a few months back the story involved a fountain of youth-like perfume that gave a housewife back her youth. The most recent synopsis makes the female lead’s transformation sound much more dramatic, describing her as having “returned from hell” to become the hottest rising star in the model world. She might be the talented rookie, but as we can see from the stills, Go Won-hee is roughing it in a park at night, pulling a newspaper over her for warmth like all homeless people do.
Thankfully, she seems like the spunky type. Or maybe desperate times call for desperate measures. In any case, several of the stills show her throwing herself in front of Shin Sung-rok’s car, which is pretty ballsy given that they’ve never met and he’s known to be the prickliest designer in Korea. Honestly, I tend to roll my eyes at the prickly creative types, but after reading Shin Sung-rok’s character description, I would be pretty sensitive too: The designer, who is undergoing a bit of a creative dry spell when we first meet him, has a record 52 phobias and 35 allergies. He tells himself that god was jealous of him and gave him all these phobias and allergies as punishment, which says something about his character, namely that he’s an odd one.
I love a good fantasy rom-com, and it will be especially interesting to see how Shin Sung-rok fares in a non-villainous romantic role, so I look forward to the KBS show. Perfume will premiere on June 3.
