Jung So Min Straddles Two Fashion Extremes for March Magazine Pictorials

I love Jung So Min dearly, for her down-to-earth nature and innate acting talent, but I often wonder if she burst onto the K-ent scene too fast and too early. Now that Kim Nam Gil is out of the army, looking back at the last three years that seemed to have flown by, I realized that her biggest roles and projects were in her first year of acting. She was the third female lead in Bad Guy, which was Kim Nam Gil’s high-profile revenge melodrama which was curtailed in terms of a making any sense towards the end because he was forcibly schlepped off to the army before filming was completed. I actually thought the entire cast was on fire in that drama, even the usually bland Han Ga In, and Jung So Min hit everyone’s radar with her immediate presence. I remember disliking her character and then realizing that was because she was doing such a great job at showing us this naive and self-absorbed rich girl. She initially reminded me of Yoon Eun Hye but quickly that resemblance went away because they have very different onscreen presences. What I think might’ve tripped up her career path was landing the leading role in super high profile Playful Kiss opposite Kim Hyun Joong. I loved that drama and both of them in it, but it was a resounding flop domestically though relatively popular elsewhere and online to not render it an obscure presence. She took some time off for college and returned to acting from her hiatus with a leading female role in the sitcom Stand By and then the leading female role in the cable marriage drama Can We Get Married? I skipped Stand By an watched CWGM and found that she’s really matured nicely looks-wise as well as improved steadily acting-wise. I’m just not sure why she’s not been getting the prime time network drama lead roles again? There are definitely lots of similar aged young male actors I wanted to see her paired up with, and while she did well with Sung Joon I’m ready for something different. Here’s to hoping she does another drama in 2013 and one ventures into yet another genre. In two different magazine spreads out this March, Jung So Min does both playful and flirty as well as mod and fierce with equal aplomb, a great reminder that the girl is quite the chameleon.