--- description: A Force to Reckon With title: A Force to Reckon With image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # A Force to Reckon With by [Bryan Walsh](/author/bryan-walsh/) May 31, 2004 4:00 AM CUT by [Bryan Walsh](/author/bryan-walsh/) May 31, 2004 4:00 AM CUT Jun Ji Hyun has earned the adoration of Asian audiences by acting tough. In 2001’s blockbuster romantic comedy _My Sassy Girl_, she outdrank and verbally abused her meek onscreen boyfriend, all (more or less) in the name of love. In person, you don’t get many of the withering glares, emasculating insultsand certainly not the Tyson-like uppercutthat Jun displayed on screen. Instead, you meet someone who politely waits for you to order lunch. In real life, it turns out, Jun isn’t that sassy. But the screen persona has made the 22-year-old poster girl of South Korean cinema’s commercial renaissance a star. Despite having made just five films, Jun has become famous throughout much of Asia, smiling on magazine and TV ads from Sapporo to Singapore. Her TV campaign for Olympus digital cameras helped hike the company’s brand recognition by more than 15%, according to advertising company LG Ad. _My Sassy Girl_ was seen by more than 5 million people in South Korea and sat on top of the box office for two weeks in Hong Kong, where local films and Hollywood exclusively rule. Now comes her new movie _Windstruck_, which reunites her with _Sassy_ writer and director Kwak Jae Young, and which is set to open on June 3 simultaneously in South Korea, China and Hong Konga first for a South Korean film. “Jun is just a phenomenon,” says Bill Kong, the Hong Kong film mogul who backed _Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon_ and _Hero_, and who is co-producing _Windstruck_. Jun became Asia’s favorite South Korean actress by shattering stereotypes. “Korean women have been portrayed generally as submissive, but that’s simply not true,” she says. Her opening scene in _Sassy_ buries that possibility: she wobbled drunk onto a subway train, vomited on a stranger’s toupee and passed out in the arms of a scandalized young man (Cha Tae Hyun). Jun’s bossy character quickly took control of her timid boyfriend’s life. Through it all, Jun was in charge, and audiences loved it. Wild, free and utterly herself, Jun became a model for an assertive generation of young Asian women. “People have this notion that men have to be macho and women have to be pretty and act pretty,” says Jang Hyuk, Jun’s friend and co-star in _Windstruck_. “But if you look at Jun’s character in the film \[_Sassy_\], she presents an honest, flawed character beautifully.” Great talent often leads to typecasting, however, and in the aftermath of _Sassy_, Jun was inundated with scripts that called for a vivacious, semiviolent heroine with a slight drinking problem. Instead, Jun signed on for _The Uninvited_, a classic South Korean horror film that dealt with infanticide, suicide, parricide and severe wedding anxiety. The depressing film had a lukewarm performance at the box office, but the role proved she had range. When Jun decided she was ready to return to comedy, so was Kwak. He’d written the script for _Windstruck_, a tale of a romance between a goofy high-school teacher and a sassy female police officer, with Jun in mind. The scriptand Jun’s likely involvementcaught the attention of Kong, who was looking for a way into South Korea’s ballooning film industry, which now captures more than 50% of the country’s box office. Kong thought that a broad South Korean comedy like _Windstruck_, with an international star like Jun, had a chance to be a pan-Asian success. “Korea is not like Japan,” separate from the rest of the region, he says. “Its culture is closer to China, closer to the rest of Asia.” _Windstruck_ wants to be a more ambitious film than _Sassy_, so Kwak turns off the fun too soon and retreats to typically South Korean melodrama. Yet the movie manages to rise above its occasional sappiness, thanks mostly to the charm of its two young stars. Jun pulls off her signature trick: veering between violence and vulnerability and back again, without missing a beat. After lunch, she leaves for a photo shoot, for which the conceptapparentlyis that she is “the world’s favorite girlfriend.” Not yet. But give her time. 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