Shin Min-a on Playing Twins in The Eyes: "I Felt Real Fear on Set"

Shin Min-a has built one of the most recognizable filmographies in Korean entertainment, but the actor still talks about her career like someone with something to prove. Long beloved as a "rom-com queen" on Korean television, she now turns to heavier material in the thriller film The Eyes. "No matter the genre, I always pick the role and the project that pulls me in," she said. Twenty-nine years into her career, her eyes lit up when asked what kind of acting she still wants to try in interview.

"As an actor, I have this urge to keep changing," she said. "Every time a new project comes along, I want to show audiences something they haven't seen from me yet. I feel lucky that the projects I've shot recently have all been so different in genre and tone."

The Eyes, directed by Yum Ji-ho, is a psychological thriller about Seo-jin, a woman losing her sight to a genetic disease, who begins questioning the sudden death of her twin sister, Seo-in, and uncovers a disturbing truth. Shin plays both sisters.

She described Seo-jin as someone who feels she has to protect Seo-in while also struggling with self-doubt next to her gifted twin. Seo-in, on the other hand, "probably carried constant guilt toward her sister, because she couldn't really function without her," Shin noted.

"The technical side of acting two roles in the same location, twice, was honestly hard," she admitted. "But once I just accepted that Seo-jin and Seo-in were completely different people, figuring out how to play them came together pretty easily."

Shin appears in nearly every scene of the roughly 100-minute film. As her character's vision fades, she runs through the story chasing answers about her sister's death, at one point fleeing with her eyes wrapped in heavy bandages. Carrying that immense tension, Shin said, took a physical toll. "I felt real fear while we were shooting," she said.

"When we were filming the chase scenes, my body would tense up and I couldn't even turn my neck," she recalled. "I could feel how tense I was while acting. I started thinking I needed to manage that energy carefully so I wouldn't get hurt. For the dangerous scenes with the bandages, we cut tiny holes in them, but I still couldn't really see, and that was suffocating. It gave me a genuine sense of fear."

She was candid about how physically demanding the work was, noting that scenes of running away or hiding "use every muscle you have." Still, she said she would do another thriller in a heartbeat, and even expressed a desire to push further.

"If I do another thriller, I'd want to really let loose and go bigger with it," she said with a laugh. "I'd love to play a truly evil villain. But nobody offers me those roles. Ha!"

The film leans into immersive sight and sound to put the audience inside Seo-jin's shrinking field of vision. Shin pointed viewers toward that experience as the heart of the movie. "Focus on the fear of trying to find someone while you're losing your sight and being chased," she said.

Following her turn as a thriller lead in The Eyes, Shin will return to television later this year in the highly anticipated drama The Remarried Empress. She playfully laughed off the genre titles that follow her around. "I'm grateful people call me a rom-com queen and a thriller queen," she said. "But in The Remarried Empress, I'll be playing an actual queen." After her powerhouse performance in The Eyes, industry attention is already turning to what she will show next.