Park Eun-bin poses for photos during the press conference for the South Korean medical thriller series 'Hyper Knife,' March 17, 2025. Handout/Disney+Upon reading the script for “Hyper Knife” for the first time, Park Eun-bin was immediately drawn to the main character Jung Se-ok—a role the South Korean actress described as one she had never portrayed before.

“When I was shooting ‘Castaway Diva,’ I got the script [for ‘Hyper Knife’],” Eun-bin recalled, referring to her last drama which aired in 2023. “Reading about the character [Se-ok] hooked me right away. I think I was just drawn to it almost instantly.”

But Eun-bin acknowledges that “it might be difficult to relate” to Se-ok, who displays “antisocial” behavior. In fact, she admits that she doesn’t aim to persuade the audience to support her character.

“I don't want you to root for her, I don’t want you to totally understand and relate to her because she is a psychopath. I just want you to know that there could be people like this in the world,” she said via an interpreter at a recent press conference for “Hyper Knife.”

The medical thriller series, set to premiere on Disney+ on March 19, follows Se-ok, a brilliant neurosurgeon who loses her medical license after a clash with her mentor, Choi Deok-hee (portrayed by veteran actor Sul Kyung-gu). Stripped of her credentials, Se-ok turns to performing illegal surgeries in secret, driven by her obsession with medical mastery.

“This is truly a character that I haven’t played before, a genre I haven’t experienced yet,” said Eun-bin, who earned the Grand Prize at the prestigious Baeksang Arts Awards for her performance in the titular role of the legal drama “Extraordinary Attorney Woo.”

READ: Park Eun-bin on Baeksang win

Describing Se-ok, Eun-bin said: “She’s uncontrollable, like a loose cannon and sometimes she’s almost childish. She’s very simple-minded. She has this one obsession. And she is a very transparent person, in that sense.”

Director Kim Jung-hyun explained he chose Eun-bin for the lead role because he wanted to show “a new facet” of the actress.

“With ‘Hyper Knife,’ I think I went to a very drastic length because this is a role that we don’t usually expect of Eun-bin. I had a lot of high expectations for Eun-bin, but I knew she would pull this off so well and just nail this character,” he added.

Sul Kyung-gu

Eun-bin was also the main reason Kyung-gu, also a Baeksang grand prize winner whose recent films include “Kill Boksoon” and “The Moon,” took on the project.

“I had so much expectations for her and I was excited to be working alongside her. She is basically the reason why I chose this project,” he said.

Eun-bin said she was “just full of dopamine” whenever she would film scenes with Kyung-gu. “He gave me a lot of energy. I could work off of his energy… As an actor myself, I was very honored to be able to work with Kyung-gu,” she said.

‘Amazing’ actors

Audiences can expect top-notch performances from the lead actors, said Park Byung-eun, who plays anesthesiologist Han Hyeon-ho in the series.

“Watching the members of the cast at their craft, I was just in awe of how amazing they were. It’s not always like that on every project that you work on,” said Byung-eun, whose past series include “Kingdom” and “Eve.”

“[‘Hyper Knife’] was truly a special production where just watching them deliver each line, each facial expression, with every scene, I was just in complete awe,” he said.

Yoon Chan-young, the youngest of the four lead actors, said he felt “immense honor” to work alongside his co-stars.

Park Byung-eun

Yoon Chan-young

In the series, Chan-young, known for the zombie horror series “All of Us Are Dead,” takes on the role of Seo Young-ju, Se-ok’s assistant.

“I am a big fan of Eun-bin, too, and when I was working together with her, I was a bit nervous at first. In most of the scenes that I’m in, I’m together with Eun-bin but she's always so nice and caring of me,” Chan-young said.

In preparing for the medical surgery scenes, the cast members had to watch neurosurgery videos and received guidance from an expert, Kyung-gu shared. They also worked with stand-in performers.

“There was actually a professional neurosurgeon who would come to talk to us about the videos... The professor was always there with us on set when we had those [surgery] procedure scenes. And for the procedure scenes, there were stand-ins for the hands,” Kyung-gu narrated.

“For Eun-bin, she couldn’t find a stand-in for her hand so the surgeries that she did, she did it herself with her own hands. So we prepared really hard for those scenes,” he said.

Director Kim Jung-hyun (left) joins the cast of 'Hyper Knife'

Offbeat characters

Since “Hyper Knife” joins a growing body of medical K-dramas, director Kim said the series stands out from others due to its “array of characters” and “very strange story.”

“All the characters, there’s something off about them. These are characters that you wouldn’t usually see in Korean shows so it was very unique,” he said.

Kyung-gu, meanwhile, noted that the series “deals with the subject matter of shadow doctors, which has never been dealt with in a K-drama before.”

For Eun-bin, the character dynamics serve as the most crucial point of the series. “So the chemistry between the characters and how we convey those dynamics are extremely important,” she said.