'Pavane' stars talk chemistry behind an unlikely romance

A pavane is a slow court dance, stately and deliberate.

Lee Jong-pil's Netflix film borrows the name and the tempo from the dance. Its rise on the charts, though, has been anything but slow.

Since its Feb. 20 release, "Pavane" has climbed to No. 1 among movies in South Korea and No. 7 on Netflix's global chart for non-English films.

Adapted from Park Min-gyu's 2009 novel "Pavane for a Dead Princess," the film follows two young department store workers: Gyeong-rok (Moon Sang-min), an aspiring dancer grinding through shifts in the parking lot, and Mi-jeong (Go Ah-sung), the worker everyone calls "dinosaur," banished to the building's basement because of her looks.

Byun Yo-han rounds out the trio as Yo-han, the charismatic oddball who nudges them together, and whose own narrative takes center stage toward the end in ways you don't see coming.

"Pavane" runs on muted tones and measured cinematography, trading big emotional payoffs for something more abstract and poetic. Without raising its voice, it asks you to buy a fairy-tale romance between a freakishly good-looking guy who turns every head and a girl whom everyone around her flat-out calls ugly.

Call it bold or reckless, but either way, it's up to the leads to do much of the convincing. In separate interviews in central Seoul on Wednesday, Moon and Go talked through what it took to make that bet pay off.

Moon, 25, says he's still figuring out what kind of actor he is. "Pavane" marks his feature debut, following a breakout in the 2022 period drama "Under the Queen's Umbrella"; he's currently fronting another period piece, JTBC's "To My Beloved Thief."

Moon described the first script reading as a moment of self-recognition.

"The dialogue sounded so much like my own way of talking. That's when I knew I had to do it." He wanted to play Gyeong-rok as a regular twentysomething, all blunt emotions and no frills. "He's awkward but sincere. I figured that could be his greatest charm."

The trickier question is what draws Gyeong-rok toward Mi-jeong. At one point, he tells Yo-han it's out of pity, but apparently, Moon doesn't buy his own character's excuse.

"He surely didn't mean that. He was just too embarrassed to admit the real thing." Moon sees the guy as someone fumbling toward feelings he can't put words to, who'd never had someone make him smile before and then fell for one who did.

Go Ah-sung has been acting since her debut as a child star in 2004.

The 33-year-old has worked with Bong Joon-ho ("The Host," "Snowpiercer") and Hong Sang-soo ("Right Now, Wrong Then"), but "Pavane" is, oddly enough, her first romance.

She'd been attached since the first production meeting with the director in 2017. Over the wait, the two had room to rebuild Mi-jeong from the ground up.

"There was a point where I wanted to shake everything up, with the special effects and all," she says. "But we settled on something more grounded. It wasn't about the looks. It was about playing someone who knows her own weaknesses, and carrying that in her eyes."

Playing a character explicitly described as ugly is no small ask for any actor. Go put on 10 kilograms and worked with the special makeup team on the smaller touches: A dental prosthetic that widened the gap between her teeth, outfits that don't fit right. She pitched the idea that Mi-jeong's apartment would have no mirrors.

"She's not someone who looks at her own reflection. So when she puts on makeup, I suggested she pull a vanity out of a closet. The director built it into the set."

When the two met for their first read-through, Go said it clicked right away. "This tall person showed up, completely ready. I thought: So it's you. I've been waiting."

Moon called her an anchor, someone who made him feel protected on set. He recalled watching the finished film and seeing how Go and Byun made up for the rough edges of his acting. "Without them, I'm not sure any of it would've held up. They shielded me like a wall," he said.

The romance plays out differently than most love stories on screen. Instead of the face-to-face gazes that drive the genre, Gyeong-rok and Mi-jeong tend to look in the same direction, side by side.

Go noted how the director described it as a film in which the female lead starts off observed from the outside but gradually becomes the center of gravity. That shift comes through in a letter Mi-jeong reads aloud in voiceover, her face never shown.

Both actors talked about "Pavane" as a portrait of youth worth sitting with. "The film let me capture my face in my mid-twenties," Moon said. "It's the kind of thing you get to carry around."

For Go, the whole experience cut deeper. She talked about years of playing strong, self-assured women, and how Mi-jeong forced her to confront what she'd been tucking away.

"I'd convinced myself I was that person, put-together and confident. The truth is, I'm not. ... There are insecure parts I've kept hidden for a long time. Mi-jeong made me crack all of that open."

"Pavane" is available on Netflix.