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| Singer actress Suzy / Yonhap |
The moment she picked up the script for "The Sound of a Flower," Suzy knew she had to be in the movie.
A member of the girl group miss A, the 21-year-old had been asked to play Jin Chae-seon, an aspiring Korean opera singer in the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1897) when women were banned from the stage.
Suzy said reading the script had made her teary-eyed because she was able to relate with so much of the frustration and doubt Jin experiences.
"My parents didn't approve of my singing and dancing. So sometimes I hid the fact that I was going out to practice," she said in an interview with Yonhap News Agency on Thursday. "There were many times when I felt I wasn't good enough. I remember crying helplessly at the dance studio because I wanted to quit. I was so frustrated and sad."
Luckily for Suzy, wanting to become a singer isn't a crime, as it was for Jin, a real historic figure who became Joseon's first female "pansori" singer in 1867.
In the Lee Jong-pil feature, Suzy dresses as a man and adopts a Jeolla dialect, playing a very different role from that in "Architecture 101," a 2012 romantic film in which she plays a college student who is the protagonist's first love.
Suzy has studied pansori for a year to make the progress Jin makes in her craft more real.
"There are no musical scores for pansori so it's different every time. It was easy to forget the notes so I listened to the recordings of my lessons repeatedly," she said. "At first, pansori felt so foreign, but now it's become so familiar that I hum on a regular basis. I plan to keep on learning."
But learning pansori was only a tip of the iceberg for the kind of work she had to put into the movie. In one scene, she had to stand in the rain for hours.
"I had a hard time because I caught cold so frequently," she said with a giggle. "I also injured my vocal chords in the scene where I had to scream at the top of my lungs in the rain. In one scene where I jump in the water in cold weather, I felt as if my ankles were getting amputated."
Despite her moderate success in movies and dramas, Suzy said she wants to continue her career in both singing and acting.
"As of now, I still want to do both. Maybe that'll change later," she said. "But that's like asking me whether I like my mom or dad better." (Yonhap)
