Moving away from home for the first time — paying bills, staying on top of classes, getting along with your housemates — is hard enough. But when your mysterious chain-smoking downstairs neighbor happens to be a major K-pop idol in hiding — one who either can’t stand you, wants to be your friend, or, possibly, is in love with you? — well, that takes things to another bewildering level. And in the new series Doona!, things are never quite what they seem.
Based on the popular Korean webtoon 이두나! (The Girl Downstairs), Doona! is directed by Lee Jung-hyo (Crash Landing on You). Baeksang Arts Awards Best New Actor winner Yang Se-jong (Temperature of Love) stars in the nine-episode series. Portraying the title character is Bae Suzy, who came to fame as part of the K-pop group Miss A before she turned to acting (she’s a two-time Baeksang Arts Awards winner for The Sound of a Flower and Architecture 101).
You can stream all nine episodes here.
Check it out at the top of this article.
Doona! opens with a moody, haunting sequence. A superstar, dazzling under stage lights, performs to crowd cheers echoing through a major arena — before she plunges dramatically into dark water. Her eyes open in a cluttered bedroom. Was it all a dream?
Cut to earnest young university sophomore Won-jun (Yang), who’s tired of commuting an hour each way to classes and is moving away from home for the first time, catching a ride to the bus station in his best friend Kook-su’s work truck. The dashboard is plastered with pictures of Kook-su’s favorite K-pop group, Dream Sweet, whose songs are, naturally, playing on the stereo. But Won-jun’s too preoccupied to take notice of any of it, not even the air freshener printed with the image of Dream Sweet star Doona dangling right in front of his face.
Nor does it dawn on him at first why the girl constantly smoking cigarettes outside his new shared housing seems so familiar. Won-jun’s an engineering student and a math tutor — maybe numbers are easier to understand than people. Unwittingly he goes about his business — meeting his strange new roommates, setting up his room, looking for part-time work — while absentmindedly singing one of Dream Sweet’s songs as he strolls through the outdoor common space. Uh, major faux pas: Yes, the loner downstairs neighbor filling up the courtyard ashtrays happens to be none other than Doona herself. She’s quit the band, is living anonymously and what’s more, she’s got zero patience for stalker fans.
In fact, she won’t hear it when Won-jun protests he isn’t a stalker, or even a superfan, he swears he just happened to be wearing a Dream Sweet merch hoodie his friend loaned him. But after they get off to a hostile and testy start, Doona starts acting even more bizarrely — constantly inviting him to go out to eat, showing up in his class, drawing closer to Won-jun yet insisting he promise to never fall in love with her. As he warily befriends Doona, he can’t help but notice how alone she is, and how prone she is to outbursts of anger and violence and self-destructiveness. And why did Doona quit Dream Sweet? Enigmatic flashbacks from her former life, unanswered calls from her mother, and cryptic messages from her agent/ex hint at a deeper story about to be revealed.
Meanwhile, more drama is slowly unfolding: When Won-jun’s old classmate and former crush Jin-ju (Hayoung) enters the picture, Doona starts coaching him on matters of romance. But what are Doona’s true feelings? And, perhaps most complicated of all, what are Won-jun’s — and for whom?
Doona! is based on the Korean webtoon 이두나! (The Girl Downstairs).
No, it’s fictional, although several of the actors had plenty of real-life K-pop experience to draw on. Oh Ha Young (stage name Hayoung) is a member of Apink, who released their 10th mini-album, Self, this year. And when Bae Suzy stepped into the title role as a former K-pop star, she thought back to her days as a singer in Miss A, which was formed by JYP Entertainment: “As I was acting out Doona, I did think of the times when I was part of a girl group,” she said in a recent press conference. Mostly, she added, she was motivated to join the series because she was interested in the webtoon it’s adapted from.
But the actor also said that her own experience in Miss A, which disbanded in 2017, doesn’t exactly mirror Doona’s: “Looking back, I feel like there were moments that I felt I was struggling but I didn’t really know much. I think I tried to deny that I was struggling. I tried to just stay a bubbly person.”
Doona! is set in Seoul. Some scenes were filmed at KCON Japan.
