IU Torn Apart After Alleged Appearance Fees For “Perfect Crown” Get Exposed
A viral post has exposed IU‘s alleged appearance fee for MBC K-Drama Perfect Crown and triggered scathing backlash towards the idol-actress.
According to the post, IU is earning around ₩500 million KRW (about $336,000 USD) per episode, totaling ₩6.00 billion KRW (about $4.03 million USD) across 12 episodes. This would make her one of the highest-paid actors in the industry, yet many Koreans seem to think she’s not worth her buck.
If this is true, it feels like there’s no future for South Korea. 6 billion won for IU and her terrible acting?
— Viral post on Pann
The fees and acting controversy aside, the K-Drama has been torn apart after facing heated accusations of deliberately inserting pro-China elements into its storyline.
- A scene in which the Korean royal palace is set on fire three times.
- The drama is set up so that the Korean royal palace doesn’t even have proper fire extinguishers. They put out the fire by splashing water with buckets.
- The female lead refuses to wear a hanbok.
- Every single villain in the drama is dressed in hanbok.
- While the female lead refuses hanbok and instead wears modern clothes and a Chinese zǎn hair ornament, the Queen Dowager — the only one wearing hanbok — is made to kneel before her.
- The Queen Dowager prostrates herself in a formal apology before the Grand Prince, dressed in hanbok.
- The female lead uses Chinese-style tea ceremony methods at the Korean royal court.
- The Korean royal court uses a Chinese-made fountain pen.
- The male lead uses the phrase “cheonse cheonse cheoncheonse” — a form of salutation used when Korea was a vassal subordinate to an imperial power. A sovereign nation would use the 12-ryu myeonryugwan crown, but instead, the 9-ryu myeonryugwan crown worn by subjects of the Emperor of China is used.
- Altogether — the hongseo ritual garment, the gujanbok robe, the cheonse salutation, the erasure of chingje history, and the 9-ryu myeonryugwan crown — these are all signs that Korea is being depicted as a vassal state of China.
The alleged appearance fees have only increased the backlash towards IU further.
- “‘I’ve got my money, so I’m fine. Public opinion’s bad, so I guess I should apologize.'”
- “Is it really just a coincidence that IU, who speaks Chinese as well as a native speaker, ended up as the lead of that drama?”
- “Honestly, what’s so shocking about the Perfect Crown controversy is how deep in China’s pocket do you have to be for a Chinese-style tea ceremony that Koreans have never seen or heard of in their lives to be casually featured in a drama about Korea? Everything else you could chalk up to a mistake, but that’s the kind of thing you simply cannot include without putting it in deliberately.”
- “If that’s how they’re going to be, why not just go to China and work there openly pandering to them. Why stay in Korea acting pro-China and getting dragged for it?”
