WILL she make it, or won’t she?
All eyes are on Korean actress Jun Ji Hyun, who is making her Hollywood debut in Blood: The Last Vampire, which will open in the United States next month. The movie opened here last Thursday and has since made a respectable $353,000 so far.
Better known as the star of comedy blockbuster My Sassy Girl (2001), 27-year-old Jun is the latest Asian star to venture West, after Chinese actresses Zhang Ziyi and Gong Li.
She plays a half-vampire who uses her samurai sword to kill vampires in this movie directed by French director Chris Nahon, which is based on a Japanese anime, released in 2000.
Already, Jun’s movie has the Western media excited.
CNN listed it as the No. 3 film on its “15 Movies for Geeks in 2009” list in January. It came in behind Fanboys, which was No. 1, but beat movies like Star Trek, which was No. 7.
But Jun – who has adopted the name “Gianna” in anticipation of her breakthrough – was not prepared for her first action role in Blood, she told my paper while in Singapore last month.
“If I had known that the action scenes would be so difficult, I’d have had second thoughts about doing the movie,” she said through a translator.
She went through three months of martial-arts training in Los Angeles and China under Hong Kong director and choreographer Corey Yuen.
“Sometimes, I wanted to give up,” she recalled. But asked if she would take on action roles again, she replied in the affirmative. “I’ve learnt that nothing is impossible,” she said.
Source: divaasia
