Two very different projects—a comedy and a spy action film—brought Lee Ha-nee to the 2023 New York Asian Film Festival.The quirky comedy Killing Romance became something of a cult film, while the tense engaging drama Phantom is to date the sixth highest-grossing Korean film of 2023.

Recent k-media fans may be more familiar with Lee’s comedy skills. Her wry delivery and fine comic timing generated many laughs in the recent TV comedies One The Woman and The Fiery Priest and in the film Extreme Job, one of most successful films in Korean box office history. She’s outrageously funny as Yeo-rae in Killing Romance, where she plays an actress planning to murder her husband. Yeo-rae wants to make life easier so she marries a wealthy man, played by Lee Sun-kyun. When he turns out to be a bully, she decides to make her life easier by getting rid of him. She acquires a hapless accomplice played by Gong Myung.

After a succession of succession of successful comedies, Lee decided to change course. “I really do love comedy,” said she said. “But after Extreme Job, coincidentally, I had a lot more comedies. So, I wanted to sort of cool off that comedy kick that I was on and to balance it out with more toned-down films. So, if you describe the comedies that I’ve been in as the more sunny genre, I think Phantom was more in the shadows. That was what appealed to me about the project.”

Phantom, co-starring Sol Kyung-gu and Park So-dam, is a spy thriller set during the Japanese occupation of Korea. Lee’s character Cha-kyung has been taken to a remote hotel by Japanese spy breakers. Despite the terrifying possibility that she will be tortured or killed, Cha-kyung forces herself to remain calm. Under that veneer of calm, there are shimmers of fear and sorrow.

“The hardest part about taking on the role of Cha-kyung was because the most representative thing about her character is that her sorrow is really pushed down,” said Lee. “She can't express it outwardly. Because in that period sorrow was just an everyday thing. It was a way of life. I think that was how she had to live everyday life, trying to live a normal life. That happens when you can't allow yourself to just completely let it out and, and you can’t even really cry.”

Japan occupied Korea from 1910 to 1945. Korean resistance persisted during the occupation despite brutal measures to crush it. The implications of what it felt like to live in that time really resonated with Lee.

“For me it was a really interesting experience where I think for the first time in my acting career I felt that it was almost like being slashed or being cut open in a sense,” said Lee. “There’s something really fascinating that happens. I felt that vibration of sorrow all the more stronger in my body because I wasn't able to have the catharsis of just letting it all out and letting it go. It would just continually keep compounding, I think that's what really made the vibration of sorrow really impactful for me. All the really complex emotions of her sorrows, her hopes. That all really resonated on a physical level for me.”

Lee and co-star Park So-dam master a series of emotionally engaging action scenes in which their characters try to escape their imprisonment. It wasn’t the first time Lee aced action scenes, but the scenes in Phantom presented new challenges. The heavy guns used in some of the action scenes were hard to handle.

“Maybe eight to nine kilograms for each,” said Lee. “So yeah, at first I couldn't bear the weight, but I trained and trained and trained.”

Filming the action scenes in Phantom required several 10- to 12-hour days. “It was really, really tough,” she said. “Maybe on the fourth day or the sixth day it was really, really hard. But at that moment, I realized I had some energy that I didn't feel before. It’s a weird energy that came from somewhere inside of me. So that was a very weird experience. But sometimes when I'm burned out, physically burned out another energy comes from somewhere inside.”

Her performance in Killing Romance also offered challenges, including a rap scene in a sauna that was improvised by Lee and co-star Lee Sun-kyun. It started with just a single line of text and she wondered how they might rap with just that. “But then he started and when he started, I just started moving my body and my mouth. It looked like I was possessed,” she said with a laugh.

She enjoyed working with Killing Romance director Lee Won-suk. “He is so fantastic, a very, very funny guy,” she said with a laugh. “He has a very unique energy.”

It was also fun working with co-star Lee Sun-kyun and they made a pitch-perfect comedy team. “Sun-kyun has a very good heart and he’s a very passionate actor,” she said. “So I did the acting, then he did the reacting.”

It wasn’t their first time working together. The actors previously appeared in the same drama.“More than 10 years ago we met in Pasta,” she said. “So, yeah, the second round is a totally different story. because I know him and he knows me, everything about me. So, it's really easy to act together.”

As well as appearing in Pasta, Lee can be seen in dramas such as Shark, Modern Farmer and Come Back Mister and films such as Tazza: The Hidden Card and Fabricated City. Her favorite memories of recent film sets underscore how much she derives from a challenge and also just how hard filmmaking can be. For Lee, the most memorable scene in filming Killing Romance happened when she and co-star Gong Myung are running from her character’s husband, Jonathan.

“We are running from Jonathan in the forest,” said Lee. “We are running from Jonathan, but also running from everything. Shooting it, we were running all night. It was really tough, but between 3 am and 6 am, before the sunrise, it was really fresh. Running from Jonathan and everything felt real and also very fresh. It was a memorable moment.”

Promoting films is just part of Lee Ha-nee’s plans for 2023. She can soon be seen in the second installment of the sci-fi film Alienoid and will also star in the historical TV series Flower That Blooms at Night.