headcanon #006: space sweepers
word count: 501 words.
mirae’s last project before space sweepers had been yongsoon, her first lead role, in 2017. though the film released almost four years after her preceding project, the entire process of the film from mirae’s first audition to the release of the film was the longest out of all of her previous projects. the ambitious nature of the film meant the pre-production and post-production periods in particular were elongated.
filming itself lasted four months of pretty intensive filming. mirae wasn’t in pretty much every scene like for yongsoon, but she was in the majority of them and she had to adjust to new parts of acting she’d never had to tackle before due to the amount of cgi in the film and one of the other main cast members being a cgi robot, meaning the actor playing the role wasn’t always present on set.
captain jang was a very different role from those mirae had played previously, as she’d up to that point been typecast into young roles with some aspect of innocence to them. captain jang doesn’t have any defining sense of innocence or purity to her and is instead rough around the edges, the captain of a space ship, and a former soldier. mirae was pleased to be able to step outside of what she’d done up to that point in such a big way and felt it would be a turning point in her acting career if she pulled off the role successfully. she put a lot of time and effort into studying the character before and during filming and she perceives space sweepers as being the film she grew the most as an actor during the filming of.
critical reception to her portrayal was mostly positive, excluding the always-present dubiousness that some feel towards idol actors. she was able to establish herself more as an actor and lit a fire within herself for acting that’s allowed her to start pushing past the limits that were on her for a long time of putting the group first before her personal career.
mirae says she doesn’t ever want to play two characters that are too similar, and she holds to that, but she’d like to take on another role like captain jang one day, someone assertive and capable. captain jang was a character with very different life experiences to mirae, but she was still able to connect to the character, which mirae credits as the reason she was able to keep her portrayal grounded and sympathetic.
it was only when working on this film that she realized how much her previous roles had felt based around men and even when she played someone who didn’t feel that way, she was oftentimes surrounded by men on set. while she’s satisfied with her work in space sweepers in many ways, it did make her want to try to seek out more roles where she can act within projects with a lot of women both in front of the camera and behind it.
