The famous old Korean sageuk(historical drama), Jewel in the Palace, tells a story of a court maid named Janggeum, who becomes the royal cook, then the royal physician. Based upon a real figure, the central character is said to be the only female who became a physician attending to the King of Korea.
Janggeum thus was a cook and a physician, doing two jobs.
It was set in 1540s when the distinction of a cook and a physician was not too different, so they could get away with this unlikely story (not much is known about the real figure, other than that she attended to the reigning king in his last days. It is likely that she was trained for medicine (mostly to treat court ladies who could not be treated by men by the standards of the day) from the beginning.)
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IU, by her very existence, throws a big quandary to all singers in KPop, K-O-R-E-A-N or foreign.
Not only they have to fear her, who regularly attacks newer acts when she feels like it,
they also have to pay filial duty to her, the source of about 90% of all problems in KPop and someone who has never really given up her wishes to end the Kpop Explosion around the world and make it go back to the bad old days, because MAMA gave her the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014, which made her a Senior Singer who can extract filial duty from all singers who debuted after her at will.
And, now , the person who is better known as a singer in K-O-R-E-A becomes the highest paid actress in there.
Although her agency (=her) denied the report immediately, it is customary in Korea for agencies to deny such kind of reports in order to obfuscate the actor's income. However Edam Entertainment has to release a statement next spring so we will know how much its ex-owner was paid, after taking out whatever Shin Sekyung, who has not really worked too much, might have made from Arthdal II.
There are no shortage of KPop figures who became actors and actresses, and Yoona and Suzy basically retired from singing and concentrated themselves on acting, with Yoona having a hit drama "Big Mouth" and Suzy "Anna".
But, someone who identifies more as a singer than an actress is now paid higher than these two now full time actresses!
List of highest-paid film actors - Wikipedia
Out of the people in this list, only Will Smith could be called a singer, who releases rap albums once in a while, but he is much better known as an actor. The others are all actors, with no singers in it.
Which makes the K-O-R-E-A-N practice even stranger, since someone who still identifies as a singer and has had the largest paid concert in K-O-R-E-A has become the highest paid actress in K-O-R-E-A, an imponderable in any given angle.
