'Squid Game' star Lee You-mi finds power in fragility in 'As You Stood By'

Learning life’s toughest lessons often begins with empathy — the ability to inhabit someone else’s pain. Few professions demand a level of emotional surrender quite like acting.

In the new Netflix Korean psychological thriller "As You Stood By," Lee You-mi embodies that challenge, portraying a terrified wife trapped in an abusive marriage — a role she says made her stronger and helped her grow in a healthy way. The series follows Hee-soo (Lee) and Eun-soo (Jeon So-nee), two close friends who conspire to kill Hee-soo’s abusive husband.

Even for Lee — whose extensive career spans 17 years since her beginnings as a child star — Hee-soo proved herself in one of her most demanding roles yet. The character, a woman stripped of agency and living in constant fear, required both emotional and physical transformation.

“Playing Hee-soo was something I approached with great caution,” Lee said during a press interview in Seoul on Tuesday. “There are so many real victims of domestic violence and the idea of portraying that through acting made me wonder if I even had the right to do so.”

Her perspective shifted after receiving a handwritten letter from the director that included Paulette Kelly's 1992 poem “I Got Flowers Today,” written in memory of domestic abuse victims and survivors.

“Reading it, I began to feel that I might be able to express Hee-soo’s emotions,” Lee said. “The poem follows a flow where, after each act of violence, the speaker says she received flowers again, and by the end, she has died. It begins with love, but as it goes on, it carries emotions that can no longer be defined, such as the feelings of someone trapped, unable to escape. That letter became a powerful source of persuasion for me and a deep comfort.”

“I felt a desire to save the character Hee-soo through my acting, I wanted to think of her, to give her warmth and somehow make her a little happier,” she continued.

But bringing that empathy to life required restraint.

“When there are no lines, I had to rely on appearance, behavior and physical expression, which made me think even more deeply,” Lee said. Throughout the series, Hee-soo speaks little, existing in silence and fear.

"I tried to fill in the gaps in Hee-soo’s story by focusing on actions, gazes and expressions that could best convey who she is. And when the camera was rolling, I imagined myself as Hee-soo completely and acted as her.”

To physically inhabit that fragility, Lee said she dropped a significant amount of weight. “When you look at her meal scenes with Jin-pyo, they feel very tense. They are not a comfortable or natural setting. For Hee-soo, food isn’t something she eats because she wants to; it’s something she has to eat because he is eating," she said.

"So I wanted her to appear cold, almost hollow, with the kind of pain that shows even through her body.” Lee, standing 162 centimeters tall and already thin, revealed she lost nearly 5 kilograms to portray the role at a severely underweight 37 kilograms.

Despite the darkness of the material, Lee said she managed to stay emotionally grounded. “Once I separated myself, Lee, from the character Hee-soo, I realized those emotional difficulties didn’t arise as much as I’d feared,” she said. “In fact, that separation allowed me to approach filming in a much healthier state of mind.”

Ultimately, Lee described the role as transformative. “For me, Hee-soo feels like the character who made me stronger as a person,” she said. “Through her, I experienced so much inner conflict and made so many choices. And in the process, I think I, Lee You-mi, became more grounded. Every character I’ve played has helped me grow, but Hee-soo helped me grow in a healthier way.”

All episodes of "As You Stood By" are now streaming on Netflix.