Lee Se-young is stepping away from the romance-lead image that has defined her recent career to play Rashta, the ambitious villain at the centre of Disney+‘s ‘The Remarried Empress.’ A TenAsia profile published on October 28 frames the role as a deliberate break: after years as the warm, principled heroine of romantic dramas, Lee is now playing a character driven openly by desire, insecurity and the determination to hold on to power.
In ‘The Remarried Empress,’ Rashta begins as a runaway slave with nothing to her name. Her life changes when Emperor Sovieshu, played by Ju Ji-hoon, falls for her and brings her into the palace. That favour puts her directly in the path of Empress Navier, played by Shin Min-a, whose marriage to Sovieshu is the foundation of the Eastern Empire’s court. Rashta’s rise is therefore not a side plot. It is the event that breaks the imperial marriage apart and sets the whole story in motion.
The profile stresses that Rashta is not written as a simple villain. Beneath her gentle, innocent-looking exterior is a character who wants to escape the limits of the status she was born into and who is anxious about losing the position she has gained. That combination, ambition mixed with fear of falling back, is what makes her dangerous to Navier. She does not only want the emperor’s attention; she wants the security and standing that come with it, and she is willing to push Navier aside to keep them.
The contrast between the two women is the drama’s central tension. Navier is presented as a ruler who puts principle, dignity and duty first, even when her husband tells her he wants a divorce. Rashta, by contrast, acts on what she wants in the moment. Where Navier treats the divorce as a political problem to be negotiated, Rashta treats the palace as a place to survive and climb. TenAsia describes that clash of values, status and power as the key viewing point of the series, rather than a straightforward battle between a heroine and a villain.
The story itself turns on Navier’s response to the divorce. When Sovieshu informs her that he intends to leave her for Rashta, Navier accepts on one condition: he must approve her remarriage to Heinrey, the prince of the Western Kingdom, played by Lee Jong-suk. That bargain transforms a palace scandal into a contest over who controls Navier’s future, and Rashta’s presence is the trigger for it. Without her arrival at court, there is no divorce, no remarriage demand and no redrawing of the balance between the two empires.
For Lee, the role is a return to a type of character she has not played in about eight years. Her last comparable villain role was Asa-nyeo in tvN’s ‘Hwayugi,’ which first aired in 2017, a character who used and threatened others for her own ends. Since then, her public image has been shaped by romantic leads, most notably Seong Deok-im in MBC’s ‘The Red Sleeve,’ opposite Lee Jun-ho’s King Jeongjo, followed by roles in ‘What Comes After Love’ and ‘Motel California.’ The profile notes that Lee herself spoke at a Busan International Film Festival audience talk about the difficulty of playing a character whose personality felt unfamiliar to her, although it did not publish a verbatim quotation from that discussion.
That background helps explain why the casting has drawn attention ahead of the premiere. Lee is not an unknown taking on a first major role; she is an established romance lead deliberately testing whether audiences will accept her as the disruptive force in someone else’s love story. The early promotional material has leaned into that shift, presenting Rashta in soft pink tones with floral details that underline her outward innocence while the story itself positions her as the threat to the empress.
‘The Remarried Empress’ premieres on Disney+ on November 4, with ten episodes in total. The first three episodes were screened in advance in the On Screen section of the 31st Busan International Film Festival, and other coverage of the series notes that four episodes will be available at launch, with two new episodes each Wednesday through a November 25 finale. The series is based on a web novel and webtoon of the same name whose original story has accumulated about 2.97 billion views worldwide, according to TenAsia, making it one of the most widely read romance-fantasy properties to reach live action.
No official statement beyond the profile and the series’ promotional releases was available. A week before the premiere, the question around ‘The Remarried Empress’ is whether its most familiar romance star can convincingly become the character audiences are meant to root against.
