Anna, Vagabond and Uncontrollably Fond — My Bae Suzy Deep Dive

Bae Suzy in Uncontrollably Fond

Spoiler Alert — the following contains spoilers for While You Were Sleeping, Vagabond and Uncontrollably Fond.

After my wife introduced me to While You Were Sleeping, I decided to binge three more Bae Suzy shows. While You Were Sleeping had a fantastical element to it, so I wanted to watch a range of her work — different genres, different emotional registers — to understand why she's such a major star in South Korean entertainment.

Here are my quick thoughts on all three — both on the shows themselves and on Bae Suzy specifically.

Anna (2022) — I Get That It's Her Most Serious Role, But…

The premise is straightforward enough: Bae Suzy plays Lee Yumi, a woman who takes on someone else's identity — Anna — in order to access the materialistic, status-driven life she's always wanted.

The problem is this kind of story has been done before and done better. It's worth noting that Netflix's Inventing Anna also has "Anna" in the title — they're completely unrelated shows, just a coincidence — but the comparison doesn't help Anna K-drama stand on its own.

It's clearly Bae Suzy's most dramatically serious role. But when the writing isn't strong enough, no amount of screen presence or acting ability can fully compensate. I know plenty of Bae Suzy fans who love this show. For me? It was just OK.

Vagabond (2019) — Action, Intrigue and Signature Bae Suzy Comedy

This one is a different experience entirely.

Bae Suzy plays Go Hae-ri, a junior agent with South Korea's National Intelligence Service caught up in a cover-up surrounding a mysterious plane crash. It's action and thriller territory — and there are genuinely exciting sequences, including Bae Suzy herself getting into the physical action.

But what makes Vagabond memorable for me is her comedic timing.

There's a scene where her character and the male lead — played by Lee Seung-gi — are forced to sleep on the floor beside each other. She catches him watching her, calls him a pervert and tells him to watch himself. Then she falls asleep. And in her sleeping stupor, she proceeds to hug him — and then fully wrap her leg around him while he tries his best to be a gentleman.

You can't even see her face during the leg wrap. But because of how deliberately she set up the scene while still awake, and because of the specific way she commits to being a genuinely weird sleeper — you can't help but laugh out loud. It's physical comedy done with real craft.

The show does have genuinely sad moments — there are plane crash victims and real human loss woven through the plot. But because those losses aren't directly connected to Bae Suzy's character, the emotional weight lands differently than in the next show I watched.

Uncontrollably Fond (2016) — Built to Break You

This is the oldest K-Drama of hers I've watched. I've seen Architecture 101, but that's a film and her screen time is split with an older version of her character — so this feels like the more complete picture of early Bae Suzy.

The premise is genuinely hard to summarize without losing something. The male lead — played by Kim Woo-bin — is diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and shortly after reconnects with Bae Suzy's character Noh Eul, someone he's known since high school. The show weaves in societal commentary about power and abuse, generational trauma and what it means to do what's right when the system is stacked against you.

I'll be honest — it was frustrating at times. Some storylines felt drawn out. But if you watch carefully, most of them do pay off, and the character growth is real and earned. And the final two episodes are devastating in the way the show always promised they would be. You know from episode one that Kim Woo-bin's character is going to die. Knowing doesn't make it easier.

Bae Suzy cries more in this show than in everything else I've seen from her combined. The role demands it — her character carries her father's murder without justice, and then watches the person she loves die slowly. She handles the dramatic weight well. Her soliloquies feel real rather than performed — particularly the moment Kim Woo-bin dies on her shoulder. Even knowing we're hearing her inner monologue for the audience's benefit, it lands as completely genuine.

But what surprised me most was seeing the early sparks of her comedic distinctiveness even here. The way she behaves when she's had too much soju. The funny selfies she takes of herself. The moments where she yells at herself in public as if nobody else exists around her. She has a specific screaming-yell that is completely her own — funny, unhinged and somehow deeply charming. You can see her building that identity even in the middle of an emotionally brutal drama.

Final Thought

After four TV shows and one film, I'm still trying to figure out which Western actress Bae Suzy reminds me of most. Jennifer Lawrence? Emma Stone? Anne Hathaway? Young Julia Roberts?

Honestly — none of them are quite right. Maybe she's just one of a kind. I might need to watch more of her work to figure it out. Or maybe that's already the answer.