Chae Soo-bin on why the best rom-com heroes don't know they're cute

What makes a rom-com hero adorable?

For one, she shouldn’t know she is, says Chae Soo-bin, the star of Netflix’s new drama “Take Charge of My Heart.”

“I didn’t think Bo-bae should see herself as cute,” Chae told reporters in a roundtable interview on Thursday. The series, which premiered on Oct. 9, debuted at No. 3 on Netflix’s global non-English TV chart.

In one scene, for instance, her character Na Bo-bae brings a cake to celebrate her love interest’s birthday after he wraps up a tense lunch with his family.

“She isn’t doing [it] to look pretty. It’s her sincere desire to celebrate his birthday that makes her lovely to viewers,” Chae said. “So I didn’t try too hard to look pretty or act cute.”

If anyone knows how to play a classic K-drama rom-com hero, Chae does. On the small screen alone, the actor has now starred in seven in the genre, including MBC's “I’m Not a Robot” (2017–18), Disney+'s “Rookie Cops” (2022) and Netflix's “The Fabulous” (2022).

In “Take Charge of My Heart,” she plays a drama writer whose body generates electricity, giving anyone she touches a painful shock. The exception is Baek Ho-rang, a prickly hotel executive played by Kim Young-kwang, whose artificial heart needs her electricity to keep beating.

Bo-bae has a vivid imagination, often picturing herself as a character in the stories she writes. 

Chae linked that trait to Bo-bae’s isolation: Unable to freely touch others, she spends her time reading, writing and dreaming up stories of her own.

“She doesn’t use her ability like a superhero. She wants to hide it, she doesn’t want to hurt anyone and she sees herself as something of a monster,” Chae said. “Rather than focusing on how her powers would look, I tried to think about the emotional wounds she carried.”

Bo-bae’s limited contact with others also helped Chae understand her lack of romantic experience. Although she enjoyed “Better Late Than Single” (2025), Netflix’s dating show about people who have never been in a relationship, she resisted making romantic inexperience the character’s defining trait.

“People who have never dated aren’t all the same,” she said. “That’s one aspect of Bo-bae, but it isn’t everything about her.” 

“She’s someone who has received a lot of love from her family. [Her] having such a warm, loving family helped me understand how Bo-bae could be innocent."

Much of that personality took shape on set, Chae said, as she experimented with the other cast.

“Rather than deciding beforehand how I would play each scene, we experimented with different approaches on set,” she said. “I wanted to feel at ease and try everything  I could.”

In the end, she portrayed a rom-com hero that closely resembled her, Chae added.

“My closest friends watched it and said, ‘Isn’t that just Bae Soo-bin [her birth name]?’”

But Bo-bae almost never came to life. Chae said she nearly turned down the role because she was “worried that if I kept playing these lovable romantic roles, I might become trapped in them — both in how audiences saw me and in my own acting.”

"As I get older, there will eventually come a time when I can no longer play these roles. What if nobody casts me then? What if I lose confidence in myself?” she thought.

Her worries about being typecast began to ease while filming “Take Charge of My Heart,” Chae said, adding that the series reminded her that “acting is really fun.”

Her co-star Kim, who had made his own pivot from romance to thrillers, also offered reassurance: Keep building on what she does well, and opportunities in other genres would naturally emerge as she got older.

“I’ve become a little more comfortable with the idea that if I keep doing my best with the roles available to me now, one by one, a time may come when I can choose to work in other genres," she said.

BY KIM JU-YEON [[email protected]]