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The Korea Times

By KTimes
In the newly released season two of Netflix series Hellbound, actress Kim Shin-rock, 43, reprises her role as the resurrected character Park Jung-ja, delivering a chilling portrayal of a soul who has experienced hell.
When asked, “What is hell like?” Park responds with hollow eyes: “That’s … something words cannot explain.”
In season one of Hellbound (2021), Kim left a strong impression as Park, a devoted mother fiercely protecting her children. In the second season, her character has undergone a transformation, reflecting the torment of four years in confinement.


Audiences have praised her intense performance, describing it as a “masterclass in acting” and “possessed acting”, and “otherworldly”.
In a recent interview, Kim said: “I portrayed Park Jung-ja as fragmented and broken, making her voice inconsistent to convey the aftermath of her experiences in hell.”
Hellbound is a thriller series that depicts a phenomenon in which people are notified of their death by ghostly apparitions, only to be brutally killed by monsters. Kim’s character is one such person, returning to life after being killed in this supernatural event.
Her ethereal, floating portrayal was immediately recognised during the first season shoot.
“After the first scene, the crew said nothing. Later, I heard that my tone had everyone buzzing behind the monitor, and director Yeon Sang-ho decided to trust my approach, saying, ‘Kim Shin-rock is at her peak these days, so let’s go with it’. I’m grateful for their trust in me,” she said.

Her synergy with veteran actresses like Moon Geun-young, Kim Hyun-joo and Moon So-ri has been credited with deepening the series’ intensity.
Kim, who debuted on stage in 2004, gained wider recognition through Hellbound season one and has since pursued diverse roles across film and drama.
In Uprising, the film that opened last month’s Busan International Film Festival, she plays the role of a militia fighter named Beom-dong – a character that was originally written as male.
Director Kim Sang-man, impressed by her performance in Hellbound, changed the character’s gender to cast her.
After initially studying geography in university, Kim discovered acting through a theatre club.
By her final year, while friends prepared for exams and jobs, she found herself struggling with illness that kept her from campus and led her back to her southwestern hometown of Gwangju.


Reflecting on that time, Kim noted it might have been depression but that her young sibling helped her find a turning point.
“One day, while watching Animal Farm with my younger brother, I asked him, ‘Are you happy living like this?’ He answered, ‘If I had died yesterday, I wouldn’t have seen Animal Farm today’,” she said.
“It was a revelation for me, and after that, I recovered and returned to Seoul.”
After graduating from university, Kim joined a theatre troupe but admits: “I was so bad at acting that I felt like a burden.”
Determined to improve, she continued studying acting in graduate school and at the Korea National University of Arts’ School of Drama.

Later, with support from a grant from Arts Council Korea, an organisation for arts and culture, she spent two years travelling to various theatre troupes abroad, learning and refining her skills.
In 2013, wanting to study acting methods more deeply, she attended a practical acting school in New York run by a theatre company for a year.
Through this dedication, she has made a name for herself in the theatre world, committing to what she calls “my acting, under my own name”.
This article from the Hankook Ilbo, a sister publication of The Korea Times, is translated by a generative AI and edited by The Korea Times.
Read the full story at The Korea Times.


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Audiences have praised Kim Shin-rock for her otherworldly performance in Hellbound 2, and the K-drama’s creators couldn’t agree more


Audiences have praised Kim Shin-rock for her otherworldly performance in Hellbound 2, and the K-drama’s creators couldn’t agree more.


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