Lee Joon-gi’s birthday tribute: Why Flower of Evil is his most gut-wrenching, role—yes, more than Moon Lovers

‘Why did you do all this?’

‘You really don’t know?’

Such is the exchange between Lee Joongi’s Doo Hyun-so and Moon Chae-won’s Ji-won in Flower of Evil. Hyun-so has realised that his wife, despite knowing the truth about his past, has been silently protecting him from the police, to the point of almost endangering herself and sabotaging the career she had spent her entire life working for.

Perhaps it’s one of Joon-gi’s most painful performances, surpassing even his twisted raging one in Moon Lovers. He falls to the ground, sobbing and apologising for hiding, not just real past from her, but his real self—a person even he doesn’t know as yet. For years, he had cultivated the carefully structured facade of a happily married man, to escape from the previous horror of being the son of a serial killer. Somewhere, he became the man he was pretending to be—but he is too uncertain and unsure of himself.

Flower of Evil has many such nerve-wracking scenes, displaying the fractured, distorted personality of Hyun-so, who in reality, would just love to be home with his wife and child. Another example, just before the climax, is when he believes that Ji-won has been killed. You see the sense, humanity and rationality being stripped away immediately—he turns into his most primal self, a man who has nothing left to live for, and nothing to lose. Murderous rage consumes him and he is about to butcher the perpetrator, as he can only see the ghost of his father lurking near him. 

It’s chilling—you see the intangible wounds of a man just being exposed—and you don’t need blood to be convinced by it. And perhaps that’s why Flower of Evil is arguably the most nuanced, raw performance of Lee Joon-gi, who is almost synonymous with layered, complicated characters. 

It’s this emotional range that Joon-gi brings not only to Flower of Evil, but also to earlier roles—each with their own brand of trauma and the idea of conflicted, imposed resilience.  It’s a craft that he has built over-time, with a range of genres and different shows, be it the melodramatic Moon Lovers, or the sardonic lawyer in Lawless Lawyer, who too, has a rather horrific and broken past, and is determined to bring his family to justice.

Joon-gi shines with the morally grey characters—the messy, torn, conflicted people who make questionable choices that you might not root for, but compel you to say ‘I see where he’s coming from’.  Ironically, he didn’t begin his career with such roles—he began with King and the Clown, where apparently he became the face of the ‘pretty boy’ trend. Since then, the actor, uncomfortable with the idea of being at the forefront of such a trend—decided to go for unusual career choices that just propelled him to further fame.  A romantic comedy like My Girl, yes, but also a period horror romance with Shin Min-a in Aarang and the Magistrate, and a series of action shows that cemented him as the country’s top action star, owing to his proficiency in the martial arts. He rarely uses a stunt double.

And then,  he can also make his fans happy by dancing to Gangnam Style too. That’s quite a range.

It’s not surprising to see why he’s a top star in South Korea. From pretty boy poster child to emotionally complex anti-heroes, Lee Joon-gi’s journey has been anything but ordinary. But it’s in Flower of Evil that we perhaps see his most complete transformation—a character caught between love, guilt, and the desperate need to be seen for who he really is.