Warning: The article may include spoilers of Netflix’s series “The Art of Sarah”

In Netflix’s recently released mystery series “The Art of Sarah,” the enigmatic Sarah Kim keeps viewers on edge, with her past remaining elusive and difficult to pin down. Actor Shin Hae-sun, who plays the lead, candidly shared that the character’s ambiguity even made her second-guess her decision to take on the project while shooting.

“To be honest, it wasn’t so much physically exhausting as it was genuinely difficult,” said Shin during a roundtable interview at a cafe in central Seoul on Friday. “What made it hard was that I couldn’t clearly pinpoint [who Sarah Kim truly was].”


“It was the first time I played a character with such an ambiguous emotional arc,” she added. “All the characters I’ve portrayed before had very clear and defined emotional trajectories.”

Despite the challenges, the series has seen strong results, ranking No. 3 on the platform’s global Top 10 chart for non-English shows. Following its release on Feb. 13, just ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday, Shin said she was flooded with congratulatory messages.

“I really thought it was my birthday,” Shin said. “During the Lunar New Year holiday, I received more messages saying how much people enjoyed the show than the usual holiday greetings, which really surprised me.”

“Even though I’ve been working consistently, I suddenly got a wave of congratulatory messages, almost as if I were just debuting. What I found especially interesting was that people weren’t just saying, 'I really enjoyed ‘The Art of Sarah’' but rather, ‘Congratulations.’ That was really nice to hear.”

Directed by Kim Jin-min, who was behind the series “Extracurricular” (2020) and “My Name” (2021), the series opens with a dead body discovered frozen in a sewer in Cheongdam-dong, one of Seoul’s wealthiest neighborhoods in the southern Gangnam District. The victim is initially believed to be Sarah Kim, the head of the Asian branch of fictional luxury brand Budoir — a woman whose name is widely known, yet whose past remains impossible to trace. As detective Park Mu-gyeong, played by Lee Jun-hyuk, investigates the case, the mystery deepens with increasingly unexpected twists.

The character’s ambiguity also led Shin to take a different approach to her performance, far from her normal “routine.”

“As I’m not good at looking at the bigger picture, I tend to focus more on my own part,” Shin said. “So usually, I like to have a clear plan for how I’m going to approach a character before I accept it. But with ‘The Art of Sarah,’ it wasn’t like that.”

Still, the intriguing story and her personal curiosity about how it would all turn out drew her in.

“Rather than thinking, ‘I’ll do this’ or ‘I’ll do that’ while preparing, I decided to just go to the set and figure it out in the moment,” she said, adding that she prepared only abstract ideas for the character.

This lack of a concrete plan made certain scenes particularly challenging, especially an interrogation room sequence with Lee’s detective character.

“As an actor, not having a clear plan for how to approach a scene is one of the most unsettling things,” Shin said. “Like, I have to deliver lines in front of the camera, but I have no idea how I’m going to do it while not having a plan at all, which is incredibly nerve-racking. And that’s exactly how the entire interrogation room scene was to me.”

She added that the pressure squeezed out any capacity to assess whether the scene turned out well, and she was just relieved to finish shooting it.

The series portrays Sarah Kim through multiple identities, from a luxury brand seller to a person in a fake marriage, leaving lingering questions about her true self, even in its final moments, echoing Mu-gyeong’s line: “What is your name?”

While the show maintains that ambiguity, Shin offered one clear answer about her character's past: Sarah Kim has additional identities not shown in the series.

“I approached Mok Ga-hui [one of the several personas that Sarah Kim holds] as another identity that was probably stolen,” she said, noting that she discussed this perspective with the director.

Although the series is set in the world of high-end luxury brands, Shin emphasized that it is not simply about materialism.

“On the surface, it may seem like she’s obsessed with luxury goods, but at its core, I think it’s really about her own fundamental issues,” she said. “In a way, she wanted to become something of value herself. It’s not really about luxury brands, but about what the ‘value’ they represent.”

The mystery series “The Art of Sarah” is currently streaming on Netflix.

BY KIM JI-YE [kim.jiye@joongang.co.kr]