Popular Actress Recalls How Fans Of An Idol Group Harassed Her During Her Debut Days
Kim So Yeon, best known for her recent role in the hit K-Drama Penthouse, revealed a shocking story from her debut days.
On May 3, the veteran actress appeared on tvN’s You Quiz On The Block and spoke candidly about her personal and professional life. Having debuted in 1996, Kim is still very much a hot and in-demand actor in the industry. Along with her long career, she also has a loving marriage with actor Lee Sang Woo. But according to the actress herself, life looked very different for her during her early days. She admitted that after debuting, she struggled quite a bit with what Korea calls the “celebrity disease.”
While she was honest about her own faults as a young and rising star, she also didn’t shy away from sharing a traumatic period of her life where she was constantly harassed by fans of a popular idol group. Kim shared that as a young actress, she had done a project with a first-generation idol group. It was a skit, and one of the scenes required one of the idols of the group to carry her on his back. This scene became the source of a full-fledged fan outrage afterward.
How dare she get on our oppa‘s back!!!
—Kim So Yeon, describing fans’ reaction to the scene
The actress shared that some of these fans would go so far as to track down her residential complex and write vulgar messages at the shared spaces in the building, like the elevator or the playground. There were multiple times when her mother would bring a scrub to erase these texts.
They would come to the residential complex where I lived and write profane messages about me on the playground or inside the elevator.
—Kim So Yeon
My mother wiped off all the graffiti containing all kinds of profanities.
—Kim So Yeon
This was around the time she was promoting her first movie, Change. When she went to perform an OST from the movie with singer Jo Jang Hyuk at a music show, she realized the idol group was also slated to perform there the same day. The audience consisted mostly of this group’s fans, who reacted very harshly to her performance. Kim said when she first stepped out onto the stage, the audience went silent, but then he heard some whispering, and finally, they shouted at her, saying, “Get lost.”
Kim So Yeon admitted that though at that moment she handled it professionally, now when she looks back at that performance, she realizes that it was upsetting to her.
Host Lee Jae Suk responded by saying that those fans who attacked her back then have probably regretted their actions after growing up.4
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