The Woman Behind The (K-)Drama

Ju Yeon Park is a busy woman.

The executive producer has just wrapped up production on Disney+ Hulu’s popular Korean drama Tempest and has begun work on another project, details of which she is not yet disclosing. A veteran in the Korean entertainment industry, Park has several projects in the works, operating behind the scenes to assemble her staff and crew, negotiate with potential streaming platforms, and review potential scripts and stories with her team, among other tasks.

‘I hold a deep conviction in the power of storytelling to bridge language and cultural divides,” Park says through her translator, from Seoul. “I eagerly anticipate more opportunities where such transcendent narratives come to life.”

Her name may not seem familiar, but if you’re a fan of Korean dramas, you’ve probably seen her work. Park has been behind many popular Korean dramas that have built an international audience, such as Vincenzo, Queen of Tears, Doona!, First, For Love, Sweet Home, and, most recently, Tempest. Even before then, she’s worked on popular and iconic Korean dramas like Dae Jang Geum, Maui, and Can You Hear My Heart? She began her career in production, becoming an assistant director. She built solid working relationships with directors and writers who took her under their wing.

“I didn’t major in anything involved or related to this industry,” Park admits. “The director eventually liked the way I worked, so I kept working with him. After Dae Jang Geum (대장금), I continued my career with that director and the writer of that series. I kept working with the crew that I had worked with for the first time.”

She rose to the position of executive producer, working on Arthdal Chronicles and Immortal Soul/Bulgasal. She then established her own strong base of creatives that eventually became Showrunners, a content production company. Since our last conversation, she has been appointed the CEO of the company.

“My colleagues in Showrunners are my long-time friends for over 15 years,” she explains. “I worked with MBC, one of the largest broadcasting studios in Korea. From then on, we decided to establish our own production company, allowing us to enjoy the entire process of film and TV production and create engaging stories to share with people.”

It’s hard to believe it all started for Park because she disliked the ending of 1939’s Gone with the Wind. As a fan of classic films, she recalls growing up and watching the Academy Award-winning film about fifty times, confused about the reasons behind the devastating ending.

She questions, “Why didn’t the male lead catch her in the end? Why didn’t she just grab him?”

The film’s last scene made her realize she wanted to be a producer, telling her own stories, many of which have happy endings. Since then, she has worked over 30 dramas in her 20+ year career and is proud of the stories she has told. If you ask her which project she’s most proud of, she’ll always respond with the current one she’s working on.

“I am always focused on the present,” she says.

She is also dedicated to promoting Korean productions worldwide, building relationships with global executives, producers, and studios. It started with the popular drama, Vincenzo, in which the title character (Song Joong-ki) was raised in Italy by a mafia family. They hired Italian actors for the series, which Park oversaw as the Head of International. She recognized the benefits of this cross-cultural exchange of talent and wanted to continue hiring actors outside of South Korea. For her next major project, she sought out more international talent for Netflix’s Queen of Tears.

After the success of Queen of Tears, she sought to include more Hollywood actors for Tempest, such as Chris Gorham, Spencer Garrett, John Cho, and Alicia Hannah-Kim, among others, with hopes that it would serve as a beacon to Hollywood and Western productions to see the potential and originality of Korean content on a global scale.

“I aspire for this series to set a new benchmark for Korea-Hollywood partnerships,” she says. “One that empowers creators to dream beyond borders, innovate fearlessly, and pursue bold storytelling. This should not merely be a passing trend but rather the dawn of authentic partnerships grounded in mutual respect and shared growth, paving the way for a vibrant, collaborative future.”

Korean dramas’ viewership has increased by more than 200% between 2019 and 2021, thanks to the pandemic and the rise of more streaming platforms investing in the medium. Park never could have imagined this when she first entered the industry.

“The series [I first worked on,] Dae Jang Geum, a historical Korean drama, was famous in Asia, but had not reached North America yet,” she reveals. “Now, the worldwide boom for K-dramas is amazing. We have a lot more platforms to work with, which is why it is spreading out.”

It also helped that the Korean media was gaining a fan base with K-pop and Korean films, including the Academy Award-winning film Parasite (2019). Park credits streaming platforms like Netflix, Disney+, and Rakuten Viki for the rise in popularity. This led to Netflix announcing in 2023 that it would invest $2.5 billion in Korean content, including films, dramas, and unscripted reality shows, over the next four years.

Although Park plans to continue telling Korean stories with her team, she is interested in discovering what Americans look for in their content. She knows what Asians look for in their entertainment, but is fascinated by understanding the interest of American and Western countries in certain dramas, such as Squid Game.

“[My company,] Showrunners are developing stories that could work with Hollywood stories,” she explains. “We want to create [intellectual properties (IP)]. We do have IP ownership for some of the stories we would like to tell. We’ll have the right to develop stories and make films more serious, and then we can reach Hollywood with these ideas.”

With the release of Tempest, which topped the charts in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and several other countries, Park is happy and proud of the response to the series. She attributes the entire creative team, crew, and actors for their hard work in bringing the series to life.

“After dedicating years of hard work and passion alongside an exceptional team of writers, directors, crew, and incredibly talented actors, it’s truly a profound and fulfilling moment to finally present Tempest to the world,” says Park. “Every emotion and experience we encountered during filming is deeply embedded in this work, and I sincerely hope that resonates with viewers. More than anything, I wish for the audience to embark on a fresh and captivating journey through this story.”

She’s looking forward to discussing the few projects that are currently in pre-production and production at a later time, as they near completion. She hinted that one might involve a Korean actress visiting America and possibly working with Hollywood actors again. She smiles, refusing to go into further detail.

She would be interested in working with several Western studio IPs and remaking them for a Korean audience. She is a fan of the British series Normal People, which airs on Disney+/Hulu. She says that the show has a large fan base in Korea.

“If I had the opportunity to remake something, it would be [that],” she says. “The feelings from those characters are the kinds of stories that Koreans love. So it would match well for Korean viewers.”

Asked if she would ever be interested in remaking the classic Gone With The Wind for the Korean audiences, she jokes that she would need to change it to the Korean War, expressing that it would require a big, expensive budget.

I then asked if, with the film’s remake with Koreans, money was no object; she said she would consider it.

“It would have a Korean protagonist in the middle of the Korean War,” Park says. “They would have a happy ending. They would kiss and get married.”

Tempest series finale is out today on Hulu/Disney+.