His words flow beautifully. His very deep, sincere and careful thoughts when he speaks out just engage people and pull them in. Yoo Ah In is a poised person indeed.
“Honest”, “bravado”, “likes and dislikes” used to represent Yoo Ah In’s words. Being honest and straight forward are Yoo Ah In’s specialty. His carefree remark can be misinterpreted as being rude in Korea’s entertainment world. Although his profession is an actor who performs before the public, he is also touted as an upright youth icon. When he notices social issues, he will speak up and share his thoughts on social media. “It’s just my opinion, but I’m responsible for what I write. Since a public figure has a certain influence, I’m trying to write cautiously. Everyone can agree and disagree with my opinion, yet still some people take it offensively. There’s a term for that: ‘프로불편러'”. [T/N: ‘proboolpeyoner’; a person who is always very serious, doesn’t have any sense of humor, has extremely conservative ethnic view and makes strong objections about other’s opinion with serious manner]
In the Baeksang Arts Awards, Yoo Ah In won best acting award in the TV sector for the 50-episode series Six Flying Dragons. Yoo Ah In, “My acceptance speech has always been a problem. Actually I didn’t remember what I said on the stage, and when I came down the stage I was like, ‘did I make a fool of myself up there?’. Then the acceptance speech became the topic, there were pros and cons. Although it’s all about award-winning speech, I’d rather show who I really am [share my thoughts] than giving a cold and heavy acceptance speech, but not everyone can accept that.”
It’s been 13 years since his début as a boyish face chasing Okrim [Go Ara] in Banolim (Sharp), now he has become an astonishing grown up man. “The number of acting years that I have is not important, because we have a lot of older generations. [The most important is] I have changed a lot in order to adapt to this [showbiz] world. My personality has changed a lot, and I also took a lot of detours. Now I came to a conclusion, ‘just smile and take it easy’. It will cost a lot of energy if you only focus on negative things. If you don’t want to be that way, you should change.”
Yoo Ah In has done a lot of interviews for his dramas and movies, and surprisingly, he always showed different expressions in each of them. From the interviews about Secret Love Affair as Lee Seon Jae to Veteran as Jo Tae Oh, when you watch [his interviews] on TV, he magically shows many different looks. “How can you comprehend a person in a one-hour one on one interview?,” he asked. After talking for more than 3 hours and emptying a bottle of wine, he got up from his seat and said, “This was too long, right? Must be too long to publish [the interview] in one article. You’d better divide it into a series.”