'Shining' Director on What Makes Park Jinyoung Special

When director Kim Yun-jin talks about directing, she sounds less like a filmmaker and more like an explorer. Her philosophy on the set of JTBC's Shining is not about shaping actors into characters — it is about discovering what the characters already living inside her cast members look like. And according to her, what she found in leads Park Jinyoung and Kim Min-joo exceeded every expectation.

"Rather than having the actor approach the character, I prefer the character to approach the actor," Kim Yun-jin explained in a recent behind-the-scenes interview. "I love the process of finding which aspects of a character are already present in the actor." It is an unusually patient philosophy — one that requires significant trust between director and performer. But for Kim Yun-jin, who previously helmed the critically acclaimed Our Beloved Summer, patience is a creative tool as much as any camera lens.

Only Park Jinyoung Could Play This Role

That philosophy yielded a specific kind of clarity on the set of Shining. "There comes a moment when you can only see the Yeon Tae-seo that Park Jinyoung alone can embody," Kim Yun-jin said, referring to the character at the center of the drama. "And the same is true for Mo Eun-ah — there is a version of her that only Kim Min-joo can bring to life."

The result is what fans have described as an unusually grounded romance — one that does not feel performed so much as inhabited. Park Jinyoung, known globally as a member of boy group GOT7, plays Yeon Tae-seo, a subway engineer who is quietly steadfast and present-focused. It is a role that requires restraint and authenticity in equal measure, and by the director's account, the actor brought both without needing to be asked.

Kim Min-joo, formerly a member of beloved girl group IZ*ONE and marking her first lead role in a drama with Shining, plays Mo Eun-ah — a guesthouse manager whose path crosses Tae-seo's across three distinct chapters of their lives. Kim Yun-jin noted that on set, she addressed both performers by their character names — Tae-seo and Eun-ah — and found that the lines between actor and character blurred in the best possible way. "They were actually lovely people who were as lovable as their characters," she said. "So discovering the characters in them was not difficult at all."

The Drama Written in Three Timelines

Shining tells its story across three pivotal moments in the lives of its two leads: their first meeting at 19, a painful separation at 20, and an unexpected reunion at 30. The narrative structure demands that the audience track the evolution of two people across a decade — and feel the emotional weight of how much has changed, and how much has not.

The show's locations were carefully chosen to support that emotional arc. Across its episodes, Shining moves through a rural village, a school full of memory, a windswept seaside, and a wetland lit at night by fireflies. Each space carries its own emotional register. But the location that carries the most symbolic weight, according to the director, is one that could not be more mundane on its surface: a subway station in the heart of Seoul.

Dongjak Station: Where Seoul Itself Becomes a Character

"One of the most important spaces in this work is Dongjak Station," Kim Yun-jin said. The reasoning is both practical and poetic. Tae-seo's occupation as a subway engineer makes the station inseparable from his identity. But more than that, it is the place where the two characters' adult lives — separate, parallel, and finally intersecting again — converge. "It can cross through Seoul, flow toward anywhere, but also pause," the director explained. "Spatially and symbolically, it was essential."

Bringing that symbolic weight to the screen required more than a good script. The production team spent considerable time and effort securing permission to film at the real, fully operational Dongjak Station — as well as access to platform areas, waiting rooms, maintenance zones, and the driver's cab itself. "Thanks to the long efforts of many people, we were able to film at Dongjak and other major stations," Kim Yun-jin acknowledged, expressing gratitude to the transit authorities and staff who made the shoots possible.

Working inside an operating subway system meant working around real trains, real schedules, and real commuters. In one particularly challenging sequence, the script called for a subway train to be held at the platform for several hours — a logistical near-impossibility in a system that runs on precise timetables. "It looked like an impossible homework assignment," the director admitted. "But after much deliberation, we found a feasible alternative and resolved it." The result was a visually striking sequence that would have been impossible to replicate on a set.

A Director With a Gift for Quiet Emotion

Kim Yun-jin's previous work on Our Beloved Summer established her as a director with a particular gift for depicting love that is restrained, real, and quietly devastating. That drama — which reunited estranged former lovers played by Choi Woo-shik and Kim Da-mi — found enormous global audiences on Netflix and earned significant critical praise for its naturalistic performances and aching emotional specificity.

Shining appears to draw from the same creative well. The drama asks its audience to sit with the kind of love that does not announce itself loudly — the kind that accumulates over years, survives separation, and resurfaces in a subway station when two people are supposed to have moved on. For a director who believes in letting characters find their actors rather than the other way around, it is a fitting subject.

Park Jinyoung and Kim Min-joo are at the center of it all, carrying the weight of three timelines and a decade of unspoken feeling. If Kim Yun-jin's account of the filming process is any indication, they carried it naturally — because somewhere inside both performers, Tae-seo and Eun-ah were already waiting to be found.

Shining airs on JTBC every Friday at 8:50 p.m. KST, with two back-to-back episodes per week.