page_title: Gong Hyo-jin
section_title: Mainstream popularity
hierarchical_section_title: Gong Hyo-jin / Career / Mainstream popularity
caption_attribution_description: English: Gong Hyo-jin in April 2012
context_page_description: Gong Hyo-jin is a South Korean actress. She is best known for her leading role in the film Crush and Blush, as well as for her popular television series Sang Doo! Let's Go to School, Thank You, Pasta, The Greatest Love, Master's Sun, It's Okay, That's Love, The Producers, Don't Dare to Dream and When the Camellia Blooms. She is considered to be the queen of romantic comedies due to her successful portrayals in her rom-com dramas.
context_section_description: After starring with close friend Shin Min-ah in the 2009 indie Sisters on the Road, Gong played an aspiring chef in romantic comedy series Pasta in 2010. Originally written as the usual brash and spunky rom-com heroine, Gong thought it would be boring and cliched to play her as such, and instead made the significant acting decision to play against type by creating the character as an ordinary girl who was seemingly meek, but had a quiet strength and slyly got her way. Her chemistry with co-star Lee Sun-kyun and the drama's breezy atmosphere propelled it to the top of the ratings chart.
  Defying easy categorization into the actress dichotomies of innocent (Choi Ji-woo, Song Hye-kyo) or sexy (Kim Hye-soo, Uhm Jung-hwa), Gong belonged to a third, very minor group of eccentrics that also include Kang Hye-jung and Bae Doona. Though not a typical beauty, after the success of Pasta, Gong was given the label Gongvely by the press, a portmanteau of her surname and the English word "lovely."
  In an emerging pattern of alternating mainstream TV series with riskier big-screen projects, Gong starred in Rolling Home with a Bull, another low-budget indie adapted from Kim Do-yeon's novel. She played a widow traveling with her poet ex-boyfriend in Yim Soon-rye's part-Buddhist meditation, part-road movie.
  In 2011, Gong acted opposite Cha Seung-won in the TV series The Greatest Love. Written by the Hong sisters, the romantic comedy is set in the entertainment industry and about an unlikely romance between a has-been pop-star and a top actor. The series was a big hit with audiences, resulting in increased popularity for Cha and Gong. She was also praised for her naturalistic, no-nonsense acting, which served to balance Cha's wacky antics. The Greatest Love swept the MBC Drama Awards, including a Top Excellence Award for Gong (her third consecutive, after Thank You and Pasta). Gong later won Best Actress for TV at the Baeksang Arts Awards.
  She worked again with Kim Tae-yong for Beautiful 2012, a series of four Micro Movies produced by Chinese internet platform Youku. that explore the concept of "what is beautiful?". In Kim's short film You Are More Than Beautiful, Park Hee-soon plays a man who hires an actress named Young-hee (Gong) to pretend to be his fiancée when he introduces her to his dying father in Jeju Island. You Are More Than Beautiful later received a theatrical release in 2013.
  Uninterested in stereotypical pretty roles, Gong said she preferred playing multi-faceted women, like the laidback, unpredictable female lead with unshaved armpit hair in Love Fiction. Known for her candor on set and in public, Gong openly admitted that she had problems with her character and took her complaints to its director Jeon Kye-soo. Though Gong said she would rather continue making small-scale films rather than do a shallow blockbuster, Love Fiction was her most commercial feature yet, and broke even at more than 1.7 million admissions. She then reunited with Love Fiction co-star Ha Jung-woo in 577 Project, a documentary that follows a group of actors walking 577 kilometers (358 miles) across the nation.
  In 2013 Gong starred in comedy film, Boomerang Family, adapted from Cheon Myung-kwan's novel Aging Family about a grown-up trio of siblings who embark on a series of misadventures after they move back in their mother's home. Gong said she felt catharsis from her character's constant cursing, and pleasure from acting in an ensemble whose actors share great chemistry with each other. Veteran actress Youn Yuh-jung said that the role ofa twice-divorced single mother was perfect for her that she couldn't imagine anyone else playing it.
  The Hong sisters cast her again in their next series Master's Sun, a romantic comedy with horror elements. Costar So Ji-sub praised Gong as "the best Korean actress currently working in romantic comedy." The drama series was a commercial hit and renewed So and Gong's domestic and international popularity.
  In 2014, Gong starred as a psychiatrist who falls for a mystery novelist with schizophrenia (played by Jo In-sung) in 
caption: Gong Hyo-jin in April 2012
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