Director Lee Chang-hee on Kim Hye-soo, Cho Yeo-jeong and K-Drama's New Black Comedy

"It had been a long time since I worked on this kind of genre piece. It reminded me of the Coen brothers in the 1990s, or Tarantino's early films. I wanted to direct it so badly. I read the script thinking, 'If not me, who could do this better?' and signed on right away."

Director Lee Chang-hee, known for "Strangers From Hell" and "A Killer Paradox", is back with another genre swing. The Coupang Play series "The Affair Was Just The Beginning" is a black comedy that starts with an affair and spirals into events no one sees coming. Lee is confident the show offers something Korean drama audiences have not seen before.

The series follows a popular influencer couple who sell an image of the perfect family, and a neighboring doctor couple in the middle of a divorce. The four get tangled in a secret so big that infidelity becomes the least of their concerns. The cast includes Kim Hye-soo, Cho Yeo-jeong, Kim Ji-hoon and Kim Jae-chul.

When Lee first read the script, he thought of the Coen brothers' film "The Man Who Wasn't There." He liked how a story that begins with one incident branches off in unexpected directions before pulling back into a single point.

"I set 'adultery is not the point' as the core of the show," Lee said. "I wanted viewers to finish all eight episodes and land on one thought: 'So this is what the story was really about.' I tried to keep the balance so it doesn't tilt too far toward one couple's story."

The show's numbers back him up. According to Coupang Play on the 12th, "The Affair Was Just The Beginning" has become the most-watched Coupang Play original series of all time by cumulative viewing. Lee said he is happy with the response so far but expects it to grow. "I think the reaction will get even stronger once episodes 7 and 8 drop," he said. "It's a genre piece, so you really need to see it through to the end to get the full ride."

Kim Hye-soo plays Kyung-hee, a top influencer who also runs an interior design company. Lee said the project started as a film script written about a decade ago. "The writer had Kim Hye-soo in mind when she first imagined Kyung-hee," he said. He offered her the role, and she said yes quickly.

"Kim Hye-soo is such a passionate person. She always lifts the mood on set, and her commitment to the work is on another level. Since this role was an influencer, and I'm not great with fashion myself, she actually brought in her own clothes and did multiple fittings. She put a huge amount of work into building the character."

The show also drew attention as a reunion between Kim Hye-soo and Cho Yeo-jeong, who last worked together on the drama Jang Hui-bin 23 years ago. Lee laughed and said he only found out about the reunion "from the news articles." He said he was more focused on what a new pairing of the two could bring than on their shared history.

The reunion came together naturally during casting. Lee said he sent Cho Yeo-jeong the script as a fan. "She's such a strong actor that I gave her the script out of pure admiration," he said. "She wanted to do the project regardless of which role it was." Once Cho Yeo-jeong heard that Kim Hye-soo was on board, she said yes right away, and the two ended up on screen together again.

To get the chemistry right, Lee leaned heavily on rehearsal. Before shooting, he ran the show almost like a stage play, blocking scenes and rhythms with the cast without cameras. On the actual shoot, he gave the actors as much freedom as possible. "I tend to give actors a lot of room," he said. "Because of that, lines and moments we hadn't planned would come out naturally."

"There's a scene in episode 8 where Bo-sung, played by Kim Jae-chul, breaks down crying. It wasn't in the script or the storyboard. I asked him about it later, and he said he got so deep into the moment it just happened. There's also a scene where Cho Yeo-jeong takes a hard fall while acting. We kept that too. I thought it fit her character, someone who starts out untouchable and slowly falls apart in the second half."

"The Affair Was Just The Beginning" wraps on September 4 with its eighth episode. With much of the story still to come, Lee pointed to the unpredictable turns and the strange shifts in each character as the main hooks for the remaining episodes.

Episode 7 uses a 'real time' structure, tracking about 40 minutes of story action in actual clock time. He said the format kept things fresh for him as a director all the way to the end. "It was a fun challenge as a filmmaker," he said. "I hope viewers feel that different kind of thrill in that stretch."

From the title alone, "The Affair Was Just The Beginning" could easily be mistaken for a straight melodrama about affairs. Lee wanted the show to break that expectation and lean into genre pleasures.

"Some people see the title and skip it because they assume it's just a soap about cheating. It's absolutely not that. It has real twists, and I'm confident about the fun of it. I wanted to show something new instead of the same thing we always see. After you watch it, I think you'll go, 'So Korean drama can do this kind of show too.'"