NTCK's 'Hedda Gabler' to run in Singapore May 28-30 Actor Lee Hye-young plays Hedda Gabler in the National Theater Company of Korea's 2025 production of "Hedda Gabler." (NTCK) Actor Lee Hye-young is on the floor stretching, as is the rest of the cast of the National Theater Company of Korea’s production of Henrik Ibsen's “Hedda Gabler,” preparing for a run-through of the play Thursday at the National Theater of Korea in Jangchung-dong, Seoul.“Hedda Gabler,” directed by the NTCK Artistic Director and CEO Park Jung-hee, is to be staged at the Drama Center Theater in Singapore from May 28-30, as part of this year’s Singapore International Festival of Arts.In a fitted light blue-and-white polo shirt and white jeans slashed mid-thigh, Lee, 63, with her signature platinum blonde, layered bob, has an air of invincibility about her as she works through the two-hour-and-40-minute play.“Hedda Gabler” premiered in Korea in 2012 and earned Lee two prestigious awards for her portrayal of Hedda. Last year, Lee reprised the title role in the sold-out revival of the play.Her interview with The Korea Herald immediately following the rehearsal begins with a question about the upcoming show in Singapore.“I have changed. I like the present. I’ve discovered more. While I think I did my best each and every time, it is also new (each time),” says Lee.“I never thought to remember what we did last year and do it the same way. That would be impossible to do anyway because much happens with the passing of time,” she explains. “I can’t do it exactly the same and wouldn’t try to do it exactly the same. Wouldn’t it be a dereliction of my duty as an actor?” she asks.In approaching Hedda for the latest run, Lee decided to take a new approach to the character.“This is not my style, but maybe I got a bit smarter. I analyzed (the character), and that really helped me. I think the cast feels that,” Lee says.Another change is a slight decline in her physical stamina.“Did I look like a woman who has returned from a honeymoon?” she asks. When the play opens, Hedda has just returned from a six-month-long honeymoon with George Tesman the previous night.When it is suggested that Lee’s Hedda appears something of a coquette, Lee agrees.“She is, in some ways,” she says.“She wants to enter a forbidden world, dreams of experiencing such desires. But Hedda is afraid and can’t do it.”While Lee began her acting career in the musical theater — she was a second-year high school student when she made her stage debut in “The Sound of Music” — she has an extensive filmography as well as numerous TV dramas and stage plays to her credit.Endowed with great bone structure, piercing eyes and a distinctive voice and diction, Lee has played everything from a femme fatale to an obsessive mother to an aging killer on the silver screen and the small screen.However, it is the stage that she prefers.“Cinema is more of a director’s art than an actor’s art. It requires skills to do the acting that the camera demands. In truth, I like the stage,” she says.She explains how her style of stage acting does not always fit with filming for the screen.“In filming, the cameras are all set. Time is very important, and you have to do what the director wants within that angle. But I don’t want to know if it’s a bust shot that is required or a medium shot or anything like that. I am only interested in my acting,” she says.While most directors have accommodated her acting style — some calling it “interesting" and "fresh” — she recalls director Min Kyu-dong not having any of it on the set of the 2025 action film “The Old Woman with the Knife."“He spoke softly," she recalls, "‘Eighty of us studied all day yesterday and set this up. If you just skim over the script, we can’t do it.'"“So, I filmed it thinking I was studying film all anew,” Lee says. “There was no need to act until I felt good. ‘The Old Woman with the Knife’ required great restraint. Every day, I felt like I came up short, that it was insufficient. But the director said that was good."The film, which premiered at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival, won Lee the best actress award at last year’s Seoul Global Movie Awards and the Korean Film Producers Association Awards for her role as Hornclaw, a deadly assassin.Lee attributes her acting style to her innate laziness. “I never pay much attention to detail. I just glance over the script and then let my imagination fly and do as I want,” she says.What makes Hedda special?“I always get these roles, roles that are a new start, a new attempt, an adventure, a challenge. I’ve never filmed a pure romance with an innocent character. Although I did debut as Maria in the musical ‘The Sound of Music.’ I guess I must have been innocent,” Lee muses.Her age of innocence lasted about a year, she recalls, after which she was offered steamy roles.“Older actresses would say how I looked like a baby, and now you have changed into a sexy woman. I guess I liked it, I liked being seen in that image,” Lee says.It was also the milieu of the 1980s that demanded such characters, the actor explains. The notorious 3S policy of the authoritarian Chun Doo-hwan regime that sought to distract the public with screen, sports and sex had resulted in a boom in film production and more erotic content.“I think all actors of that era did this. I didn’t feel really mature but had to act that way, and so it was hard,” she says.She circles back to Hedda, remembering her complete ignorance about the play "Hedda Gabler" when NTCK offered her the role in 2012.To Lee, Hedda came across as a very strong character, despite the rather plain lines.“I asked why it had never been performed in Korea and Kim Ui-kyeong, who had cast me for ‘The Sound of Music,’ said, ‘Because we did not have an actor like Lee Hye-young,’” Lee recalls.Encouraged and emboldened that it was a role that only she could do, Lee accepted the offer.“I wanted to play a woman who sought artistic value, freedom, desire, and that is what Hedda keeps saying. I wanted to play a woman who fought against those who tried to control her, to repress her,” Lee says.“The script was written as if all the other characters exist for Hedda. There aren’t many roles like that. It requires great concentration; you can’t let your guard down even for a brief moment." Actor Lee Hye-young (NTCK) Childhood dreamGrowing up as a daughter of the famed film director Lee Man-hee (1931-1979), Lee remembers being neglected and lonely.“I’d watch films on TV or sneak into a theater on the way to school. I was in the fourth grade when I crawled into a theater. No one at home scolded me or cared whether this grade schooler came home at midnight or whether I had had anything to eat,” Lee recalls, her eyes gazing toward the window.“Acting was the only thing that gave me a dream. From the fourth grade, I wanted to become an actor,” she says.“At school, I was already acting like an actor. I would tell the kids about the films I had seen, and they were enthralled by me,” Lee says, smiling. “They all came to hear me, and all eyes were on me.”Things changed when her father passed away just as she was starting middle school. Her mother, who had been separated from her for the past 10 years, reappeared after the director’s death.“Meeting my mother completely changed my life. She was a woman who had wanted to be an actor. I stole that dream from her and became an actor,” she says.In her second year of high school, Lee announced her intention to be an actor. Her school opposed it, and her father’s colleagues tried to dissuade her by talking about how difficult it was to be a film actor — how one had to “throw in their all.”So, she turned to the stage theater. “The stage theater was very intellectual, and many of the veteran actors today are intellectuals,” Lee says.When she later ventured into films, her status as a daughter of the legendary director may have helped land her roles, but it did not help much with acting.“Everyone knew I was Lee Man-hee’s daughter. So, I lacked any desperation or desire to challenge myself. I wasn’t developing as an actor. It has also to do with my innate laziness, or perhaps I felt lassitude because I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth, like Hedda,” Lee says.“Really, I was the happiest when I dreamt of becoming an actor. When I became an actor, there were so many bad things,” Lee says. “It’s just like Hedda. I entered a world that was completely different from the world I had imagined,” she says.In 1995, she left Korea for Paris, thinking she would quit acting.“I lived in Paris for a year and eight months. I felt like there was nothing to do,” she says.Her life changed once again with her marriage and the birth of her two children.“I became more comfortable with acting after my marriage and the birth of my daughter in 1998. But, I was still seen as an uncomfortable woman and people treated me as if there were a screen between us,” she says.The birth of her son in 2003 was a major turning point.“I became really at ease. I think I had needed to feel safe. I did not have a sense of being protected by an envelope, so I tried to hide it. That was uncomfortable for others to see,” she says, referring to “The Skin-Ego,” a book by the French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu.“For me, the family had always been unstable. It is hard to be a good actor, or rather, a good person in such environment,” she says.Lee sometimes wonders how she would have survived if she had not been an actor.“I did think at some point that my personality was forgiven because I was an actor. It was not because I wanted to seem that way (difficult), but because I wanted to hide the thing that made me that way,” she explains.A few hours after the interview, Lee sends a message via an NTCK communications officer:“Regarding the question about value, the value that I hold as an actor is to be someone’s dream, just as I dreamt through actors.”This is one of a series of interviews in which Kim Hoo-ran, editor-at-large at The Korea Herald, speaks with leaders, trailblazers, unsung heroes, and both well- and lesser-known figures who share the stories of their lives and their visions for a better world — Ed