Woohoo, Yoo Seung-ho (Ruler–Master of the Mask) is already looking at new drama projects, and is in talks to possibly headline one titled I Am Love for MBC. It’s great to hear, in that I love Yoo Seung-ho and was just about to say that I’d watch anything he’s in, except that’s a lie because I realize that while I have started everything he’s in, I’ve quit a bunch of them. Maybe the more accurate statement would be that I love Yoo Seung-ho so much that I have sat through a lot of bad dramas in order to see him (before then being forced to stop because of the badness). Somehow I mean this as a compliment!
I Am Love centers around a man who has nobody to lean on, neither parents nor lover, and the story that unfolds when he meets and falls in love with a woman. Yoo Seung-ho is up to play Kang Chan, a young man with genius-level drawing abilities who has had to resort to using his skills to make forgeries. As a child, he was adopted to the U.S. but was then rejected twice by his adoptive families. He suffered abuse, and was deported after getting caught up in a drug trafficking incident. Now he lives in Jeju, spending his days at an out-of-the-way monastery as a priest, and working as a forger at night. That is certainly a colorful description.
The drama comes from PD Choi Won-seok, whose prior credits include mid-2000s dramas like Firebird, Queen of the Game, and Bad Love, as well as 2011’s Miss Ripley. Sigh, okay, so he’s a hardcore melo dude. (Why, Yoo Seung-ho, why?) I couldn’t watch Queen of the Game (subpar revenge thriller) or Bad Love (makjang romance melo), but I did find Miss Ripley an engaging and relatively easy watch, and PD Choi has also worked on the daily drama Oh Ja-ryong Is Coming, which I recall being popular. If we’re looking for silver linings!
I Am Love does not yet have a timeslot or an airdate, but is being considered by MBC for a launch in the first half of next year.