Actress Park Ji Hyun Reveals Her Family Background And Her Father’s Cancer Battle
Actress Park Ji Hyun opened up about her father’s profession and his battle with cancer.
On the most recent episode of You Quiz on the Block, Park Ji Hyun appeared as a guest and shared personal stories about her life and career.
During the show, her impressive academic background was highlighted. She revealed that she scored over 900 on the TOEIC while in middle school, graduated from Chuncheon Girls’ High School, and was admitted to the Spanish Department at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.
Park Ji Hyun explained that she had originally wanted to major in acting. “When I thought about what I truly wanted to become, I realized I wanted to be an actress,” she said. “But when I told my parents, they said, ‘You’ve worked so hard academically, and suddenly going into an acting program seems like a risky choice.'”
She continued, “After entering university, I only attended classes through the first semester of my freshman year before taking a leave of absence.”
To pursue acting, she attended countless auditions. “It may have been more than 100 auditions,” she recalled. “I’ve always been someone who stays at home a lot, and I constantly questioned whether I was on the right path. If I had been in a field where progress was measured by grades or scores, I could have used that as motivation. But not feeling like I was getting closer to my goal was very difficult.”
For her role in the Netflix series “You and Everything Else,” Park Ji Hyun underwent an extreme transformation to portray a terminally ill character. “Sang Yeon was living with terminal cancer after being diagnosed with a late-stage illness,” she explained. “I wondered how I could experience even a fraction of that pain and get as close as possible to understanding death, so I fasted.”
She said she survived for about three weeks drinking only water and coffee. “It felt like my esophagus and stomach were sticking together. My body became thinner, but my face swelled up. Before filming, I would cry for about two hours and then go to set.”
Park Ji Hyun also revealed that she sought advice from her father, who is a doctor and previously underwent surgery for stomach cancer. She shared, “Around the time ‘Reborn Rich’ was released, my father was diagnosed with stomach cancer. The doctors said they wouldn’t know the full situation until after surgery, and our whole family went through a difficult time.”
She added, “‘You and Everything else’ was a project that made me think of my father. By the time I received the script, he had already recovered. I asked him questions like, ‘What kind of pain is it?’ and ‘What does it feel like?'”
According to Park Ji Hyun, her father told her that if it hadn’t been for his family, he would have wanted to give up on life. “The moment I heard that,” she said, “I finally understood how Sang Yeon must have felt.”
Source: (A)
