Lee Na-young expected the legal dialogue to be the hardest part. It wasn't.
The actress, returning to the small screen for the first time in three years, plays Yun Ra-yeong in ENA's thriller "Honour" — a celebrity lawyer with millions of followers and a carefully maintained public image built over decades of hiding private pain. The drama, which wrapped Tuesday, follows three attorneys at a victim advocacy firm called L&J (Listen & Join) as they take on a powerful sex trafficking network tied to a shadowy digital platform called "Connect In." The premise draws clear parallels to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
Lee said she first read the script the way she'd read a novel — just to find out what happened next. The second read was different.
"I went back through it, thinking about the role I had to play, and that's when I felt like I just had to be part of this story," she told The Korea Times.
She went in assuming the role would be relatively manageable. No big crying scenes, mostly legal dialogue — memorize the lines, deliver them well. That turned out to be wrong.
"Ra-yeong is a character who keeps her feelings bottled up inside, so I had to deliver everything with clarity and restraint," she explained. "Facing people in pain or hurt while giving them courage to keep going together — that meant suppressing a ton of emotion. There were hardly any one-note expressions for her."
The character's backstory involves sexual assault and dating violence that continue to shape her life two decades later. Lee said she was drawn to that complexity — not a character defined by righteousness, but one carrying old wounds while standing before the public every day.
"Rather than a Jeanne d'Arc figure driven by righteousness, this role is someone with her own personal wounds, yet she hides them and stands before the public," she said. "I wanted to express those complex layers as truthfully as possible."
The emotional weight didn't lift when filming ended. Lee said the character's sadness stayed with her after the cameras stopped.
Despite the drama's subject matter, Lee pushed back on the idea that "Honour" is primarily about sexual violence.
"I believe it's about confronting many different kinds of evil," she said. "What resonated with me more was the sense of solidarity with those who are hurting or suffering from injustice."
She also spoke about the broader shift in how female characters are written in Korean drama today — with more detail, more contradiction, more room to be complicated. As an actor, she said, that gives her a lot to look forward to.
Her next project is undecided. She said she chooses roles by instinct and doesn't know yet what she'll be drawn to next.