Kim Tae-hee uses her personal experience to portray her new character in Lies Hidden In My Garden. Photos: Handout
“Up until about a year ago, I actually had a garden in my home. But I soon realised that gardening wasn’t for me. I couldn’t handle it.
“It was not maintained at all and trees continued to die,” South Korean actress Kim Tae-hee tells StarLifestyle during a 10-minute online interview.
The top star – who is married to another top star, Rain – goes on to explain that her time was already spent taking care of her two young daughters (now aged six and four) and a big dog, so she couldn’t care for a garden as well.
“I decided we have to move to a gardenless apartment or villa. Now, I won’t even have any houseplants. I would not say I have a green thumb!” adds the 43-year-old with a laugh.
Kim is speaking to StarLifestyle about making a return to the small screen three years after playing a ghost in the 2020 K-drama Hi Bye, Mama!
Her latest is an eight-part suspense thriller titled Lies Hidden In My Garden, which is based on a best-selling novel of the same name by Kim Jin-young.
The thriller centres around two women who lead very different lives at the start of the story. Somewhere along the way, their lives become entangled.
Moon Joo-ran (Kim) is a beautiful woman who is married to a successful doctor, and they live in a beautiful house with their teenage son.
But that perfect image is tarnished when Joo-ran keeps smelling a foul odour coming from the garden.
When she voices her concern to her husband, he dismisses it as her imagination and later reasons it is probably just the smell of the natural fertiliser.
However, the bad smell keeps permeating the house and nagging her mind.
As the odour persists and her husband behave suspiciously, her unease and dread grow.
Joo-ran's anxiety grows even as her husband assures her everything is OK.
Kim Tae-hee tells StarLifestyle that she understands what Joo-ran is going through, as she could draw parallels to her own worries when she first became a mother in 2017.
“When I approached the character of Joo-ran, I had this thought in my mind: Joo-ran equals me.
“Of course, there are many things that are different, including Joo-rans’ situation, but I could relate to her and understand a lot about her.
“When you meet this character, you’ll see that she’s going through a nervous breakdown and is mentally very weak.
“I went through moments like that too, when I was extremely sensitive and mentally weak, although not to the degree where I have to rely on pills like her.
“I think it was especially during the past five years after I gave birth and became a mum and went through that pressure of the obligation and responsibility of having to raise this tiny human being into a whole person.
“I’ve had moments of weakness and constant anxiety. As I portrayed Joo-ran, I tried to channel a lot of those personal experiences,” Kim says, adding that she still has moments of anxiety.
“Rather than looking at Joo-ran as a woman who is trying to be perfect all the time, I relate more to her in the sense that she’s someone who struggles, to the end, to live her life the best way she knows how.
“That’s something that resonated with me and allowed me to understand her more.”
Lies Hidden In My Garden is available on Prime Video.
