Why Korean Superstar IU Relates So Deeply to Her Character in Netflix’s When Life Gives You Tangerines

In 2011, K-pop star IU made her K-drama debut in Dream High, a series about young people trying to make it in Korea’s competitive music industry. But after more than a decade of superstardom on stage and on screen, IU says her latest role—as a working class dreamer fighting to become a poet in postwar Korea—is the one she relates to the most. IU plays Ae-sun in Netflix’s When Life Gives You Tangerines, a decades-spanning, slice-of-life drama streaming on March 7.

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“The way [Ae-sun] has such a fiery spirit, the way she’s very competitive, the way she has a lot of dreams, and also her love of poems and literature,” IU tells TIME of her role. “All of those things are what I share as my actual personality in real life.” 

IU, aka Lee Ji-eun, debuted into the K-pop scene as a soloist in 2008, when she was only 15, after a period of living in financial precarity with her family. Her first single, “Lost Child” didn’t make much of a splash, but 2010’s “Good Day” did, and the rest is pop music history. Last year, IU became the first female Korean soloist to perform at Seoul’s World Cup Stadium, playing to 107,000 fans over two nights for the conclusion of her world tour. Her music has built a massive, cross-generational following in Korea and beyond. 

Simultaneously, IU has built a career as an actor. She played a modern woman transported back to the 10th century Goryeo dynasty in 2016’s historical romance drama Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo and a millennia-old, soul-bound hotel owner in 2019’s supernatural fantasy Hotel del Luna. But it was her turn as Lee Ji-an, a young woman struggling to get out from under debt and to care for her ailing grandmother, in 2018’s My Mister that IU calls a turning point. 

“Because I am someone who was originally a musician … for a long time, I don’t think I felt like I had that talent or that I was satisfied with my performance,” she says. “[My Mister was] the first time where I felt like I was the most in sync with my character. And, when I saw the final result, it was something that I felt was a little bit different than what I felt on set.” The performance would lead director Hirokazu Kore-eda to cast IU in 2022’s feature film Broker, alongside acclaimed actors Song Kang-ho, Gang Dong-won, and Bae Doo-na. 

For When Life Gives You Tangerines, IU reunited with My Mister director Kim Won-suk. When asked about how IU’s acting has changed since they last worked together, Kim said during a press conference for the new drama: “[My Mister] gave us the chance to showcase her wonderful talent to the world, but she was already a prepared actress. She was already talented and already detailed and nuanced.”

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When Life Gives You Tangerines gives IU the unique challenge of portraying one character across multiple points in their life—and working with other actors who are portraying the same character. We first meet Ae-sun on Jeju, Korea’s biggest island, in the 1960s. As the young daughter of one of Jeju’s hard-working hae-nyeo, women who free-dive for seafood to feed their families, Ae-sun watches her mother risk her life everyday for the meagerest of catches. Still, she dreams—of becoming her class president, of becoming a poet, of making enough money to buy her mother nice things. From this beginning, we follow Ae-sun into middle and late adulthood, as she fights to make the most of what life allows.

Originally portrayed by a child actor, IU picks up the character of Ae-sun in her late teens and 20s, then passes the role into the capable hands of Moon So-ri (A Good Lawyer’s Wife) for Ae-sun’s 40s and 50s. “I went through a lot of discussions with the director and writer,” says IU, of the acting challenge of portraying Ae-sun in different life stages. She and Moon would say each other’s lines to one another to try to incorporate similar speech patterns. “As someone who loses both of her parents and who feels like she is left all alone in the world, you’re going to get to see a lot of her defense mechanisms come into play,” says IU of teenaged Ae-sun. “She’s someone who seems to be easily irritated. She, at times, feels very grumpy, and all of that is because she doesn’t want to seem vulnerable to others.”

It helped that IU had a partner in crime in Park Bo-gum (Reply 1988), who plays Ae-sun’s love interest, Gwan-sik, in his teenagehood and twenties. (Park Hae-joon, who previously worked with director Kim on Misaeng, plays Gwan-sik in his 40s and 50s.) IU and Park have known each other since they were teens themselves, slurping down noodles for a Nongshim commercial. “From the very first day of shooting, I felt very much at ease,” says IU. “And, after we shot together and worked on this drama series for about a year, what I felt was that, even more so than what I had already known about him: Bo-gum is someone who’s just a really great person.”

IU says she and Park put particular work into their scenes as teenagers. Both actors are currently 31, more than a decade past their teenagehood. “We wanted to bring out that really pure and lovable side when you meet the characters as teenagers and while, at the same time, not making it feel forced,” says IU. “So we tried our best to really bring about an organic and very lovable energy. We went through a lot of different discussions, and also we did many different versions of the takes when we were shooting.”

For IU, who calls Lim Chang-wook’s (When the Camellia Blooms) script “a story about solidarity, helping each other and growing each other,” acting allows her a chance to be part of a team in a way that her solo music does not. “When it comes to acting, it’s an ensemble, right?” IU says. “It’s a group effort, where it’s not just about what I can do well, but it’s really about the overall chemistry and creating something together. So it gives me a stronger sense of belonging and I think, in that sense, it’s a lot more rewarding too.”

While most K-dramas, given the genre’s focus on community and connection, feature an ensemble, the ambitious scope of When Life Gives You Tangerines—which is rumored to be one of the most expensive K-dramas ever made—boasts an especially impressive team both in front of and behind the camera. The reported 60 billion won budget (roughly $41.5 million) may come as a surprise to some viewers, as big budgets tend to be associated with genres like action, fantasy, or science fiction. When Life Gives You Tangerines, however, is a slice-of-life story that finds drama in the ordinary. The series follows characters across four “seasons” of their lives, from the 1960s to today, as they love, grieve, dream, and find joy in the face of life’s cruelties. The sweeping generational drama, which was in production from March 2023 to February 2024, took almost a year to film.

“It’s quite difficult and challenging to capture the passage of so many generations in one series, and it’s quite a rare thing as well,” says Kim. “I think it’s rare because it’s challenging to put together. It requires a big budget. There has to be a talented staff and crew.” For When Life Gives You Tangerines, Kim tapped Ryu Seong-hie, the production designer behind some of Korea’s most-celebrated films, including Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden and Bong Joon-ho’s The Host. “We had the best production designer in the world working with us, and the best cinematographer [in Choi Yoon-man],” Kim said. “So many talented staff members in the art department. They worked on every single detail to make sure everything is believable.”

It’s all in service of telling a simple, timeless story of life and love that, while grounded in Korean history and culture, is poised to find a global audience as its 16 episodes are released in four installments every Friday in March. “This series is a tribute to past generations of our fathers and mothers, and it’s also an anthem of encouragement for the daughters and sons who will now navigate the world ahead,” says Kim. “We were hoping that the story will help break down the invisible barriers between generations, genders, and just people in general. We just hope it will be able to contribute to that, even a little bit.”

IU has played time travelers and supernatural CEOs. She has sung alone on a stage in a stadium built for thousands. But, after 15 years in the public eye, she finds herself seeking out roles that are relatable to all of us. In her younger years, she sought out more fantasy and other genre-related roles. “I was drawn to stories that you don’t find or you don’t think will happen in your actual daily life,” she says. “Since I’ve become over 30, I am more drawn to stories and characters that feel very natural, grounded, that tell the human side of things.”

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