Lee Jae-yoon, Lee Hye-young, Go Sung-hee
Oh yay, I’ve been eagerly waiting for more updates to this show for forever. Casting additions have been made to the remake of acclaimed Japanese drama Mother, to join Lee Bo-young (Whisper) as a teacher who kidnaps a student in the hopes of giving the young girl a better life. Lee Jae-yoon (Revolutionary Love), Lee Hye-young (Can You Hear My Heart), and Go Sung-hee (While You Were Sleeping) are reported to have joined the tvN show, which is aiming for an early 2018 release.
I expect that much of the show will revolve around Lee Bo-young and the young girl she kidnaps when the teacher notices that one of her charges is being abused at home, but it’ll be interesting to see how other characters intersect with this surrogate mother-daughter pair as they go on the run. Lee Hye-young will be returning to the small screen for the first time in six years, and will play a former actress with a pretty heavy backstory: Just as she was feeling the limits of being an actress in her early thirties, her husband cheated on her with a younger woman and took out a massive loan in her name, leaving her penniless and abandoned. She retires to the countryside and volunteers at a nearby nursery school, where she meets Lee Bo-young’s character.
Character descriptions for Lee Jae-yoon and Go Sung-hee haven’t been released yet, but I look forward to learning more about their roles, and whether they’ll aid Lee Bo-young or stymie her efforts to take her “daughter” away from an abusive environment. I also hope we hear of who gets cast as the young, abused girl soon, because I suspect it’s her relationship with Lee Bo-young that’ll have most of the emotional impact on the show. It’s been reported that producers have decided to hold open auditions for the role, so I have high hopes that whoever gets cast will have a touching rapport with Lee Bo-young.
Mother is scheduled to follow Buam-dong Revenge Club and Smart Prison Living in tvN’s Wednesday-Thursday slot, which puts its premiere in early 2018.