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Actor Yoo Jae-myung (left) and Yoo Ah-in (Scon) |
Actor Yoo Ah-in’s second film of the year has him playing a character with no lines.
In the upcoming criminal drama “Voice of Silence,” Yoo plays Tae-in, whose job is to dispose of corpses and clean up crime scenes for an organized crime syndicate.
“As an actor, a character without any lines was easy to act but at the same time challenging,” Yoo said during an online press conference Monday. “My character does make some noise in the movie, so I think he can talk. But it seems like he is declining to communicate with the world because of something that happened to him in the past.”
Yoo explained that he had fun communicating with director Hong Eui-jeong about the character. “Voice of Silence” is Hong’s debut feature. Her previous work, a short sci-fi flick about a reunified Korean Peninsula, “Habitat,” was screened during the Busan International Film Festival in 2018.
“The director sent me a link as a reference for my character. She said she thinks that Tae-in would move like this. I opened it and found a video clip of a gorilla,” Yoo said. “This was a new way of approaching the character for sure, so it was very interesting.”
It is Chang-bok, played by Yoo Jae-myung, who does most of the talking. Chang-bok works part-time with Tae-in, disposing of bodies.
“Chang-bok keeps talking to self-rationalize. He keeps saying someone has to do the job. Also, he keeps saying that he can stop doing the cleaning job after earning some money,” actor Yoo Jae-myung said during the press briefing.
The director explained that she wanted to give the two characters a job that they could rationalize doing, even though it’s a crime.
The story develops further as these two contrasting characters become responsible for taking care of a girl who has been kidnapped by a member of a criminal organization but then dies suddenly.
Hong stressed that she tried to differentiate her movie from other crime dramas by using brightly colored scenes, instead of dark and gloomy ones.
The actors and the director explained that the contrast between the mise-en-scene and the story also reflected the movie’s overarching theme, which is to make the audience think about the blurry line between good and evil.
Yoo Ah-in also added that “Voice of Silence” reflects the world that we live in. “At the end of the day, we are living in a world full of news and we have to constantly judge what is good and what is evil,” he said.
By Song Seung-hyun (
ssh@heraldcorp.com)
