Uh-oh, this doesn’t look good. Following Uhm Tae-gu’s (Maids) dropout of Bad Guys: City of Evil due to an injury, Kang Haneul has also announced that he will be quitting the project. Unfortunately, scheduling around the actor’s impending military service enlistment date proved to be impossible.
The drama is a spinoff of the highly successful Bad Guys that is supposed to show the unlikely partnership between amoral prosecutors and hardened criminals. Kang Haneul had been planning to play a third-year prosecutor from Seoul who is sent down to a provincial office after a traumatic event in which he witnesses his mentor being killed. The production team is currently frantically trying to find a replacement actor because the character is integral to the overall story line.
Meanwhile, Uhm Tae-gu was recently replaced by Ji-soo (Strong Woman Do Bong-soon) in the role of an innocent man who was framed by the mob and transforms completely as a result. Even without Kang, the casting lineup is solid with Ji-soo and veterans like Park Joong-hoon (My Dear Desperado) and Joo Jin-mo (Woman With a Suitcase) onboard. But I’m not going to lie, a huge part of why I had faith in this spinoff project was Kang Haneul, an actor who I believe could deliver a performance on par in caliber with Park Hae-jin’s portrayal of an amnesiac psychopath in the original series.
It does make me worry a little that these successive actor dropouts are happening so late in the game. But on the bright side, it opens discussion up for more fantasy castings. Maybe someone should tell them that Park Seo-joon (Fight My Way) and Ryu Joon-yeol (Lucky Romance) are free right now…
OCN’s Bad Guys: City of Evil is slated to premiere this November.