Go Kyung-pyo sure is on a hot streak—he’s been working nonstop going from Jealousy Incarnate to Chicago Typewriter to Strongest Deliveryman—and he doesn’t look ready to let up anytime soon: He’s currently in talks to join a new tvN drama titled Cross: God’s Gift, alongside veteran actor Jo Jae-hyun (Solomon’s Perjury). Both actors have been offered the two main leading roles, and are said to be considering positively.
Cross: God’s Gift is a medical drama, though it doesn’t sound like your standard procedural type of medical show: It centers around a man who learns medicine out of a desire for revenge, but in the process learns what healing is all about. That main character is Kang In-kyu, the character offered to Go Kyung-pyo, whose father was brutally murdered 13 years ago, spurring In-kyu to go into medicine to learn to save lives—and also how to kill.
In the process, In-kyu ended up at the top of his class all throughout medical school and passed his doctor’s licensing exams with a perfect score, the first in ten years to do so. His learning was enhanced by a side effect of an accident he suffered 13 years prior, where injury to the right brain enabled greater capability of the left brain, in effect causing savant syndrome.
In-kyu is now a first-year resident working in the organ transplant department of the hospital, of which Jo Jae-hyun’s character, Jo Jung-hoon, is chief. Jo Jung-hoon is a world-renowned expert in liver transplants who has published numerous articles in international medical journals and has an impressive 97 percent surgery success rate. He’s described as a strictly principled man who keeps his distance from personal greed. Okay, so that makes me think he’s not the enemy… Given that Cross is emphasizing In-kyu’s growth and discovery of the true meaning of medicine, perhaps the enemy himself won’t figure as large as a mentor-type figure. (Although you have to admit, Jo Jae-hyun makes a pretty badass villain.)
Cross: God’s Gift is being planned for a broadcast in the first half of 2018 on tvN.