Disney+ has revealed a new sneak peek of its upcoming fantasy romance “The Remarried Empress,” and the clip gives audiences their liveliest look yet at the series’ central fantasy device: Lee Jong Suk’s Heinrey, transformed into a bird, quietly spying on Shin Min Ah’s Empress Navier.
In the newly released preview, Heinrey decides to fly to Navier’s side in bird form, despite the protests of McKenna, played by Choi Dae Hoon, who warns him that there are still plenty of eyes watching. Heinrey answers with a devious wink before shapeshifting and flying out of the window, leaving his attendant behind.
When bird Heinrey arrives at Navier’s window, a crowd of ladies gathers around the empress to ask whether she has just met him, adding excitedly, “Is he really that beautiful?” Navier replies with a smile, “Of all the people I’ve ever met, he was the most beautiful. He was so handsome, it was hard to believe he was human.”
As Heinrey preens in bird form, someone asks about his voice. Navier answers, “Of all the men I’ve met, he had the most pleasant voice. I thought to myself, ‘A man like that… I bet even if he stood in the corner without saying a word, all sorts of rumors would swirl about him.’” The joke lands because Heinrey is listening the whole time, hearing himself praised by the very woman he has flown across the palace to see.
“The Remarried Empress,” based on the popular web novel of the same name, is a fantasy romance that follows Navier, the perfect empress of the Eastern Empire. When her husband Sovieshu, played by Ju Ji Hoon, cheats on her with the runaway slave Rashta, played by Lee Se Young, and divorces her, Navier responds not by accepting the humiliation quietly but by demanding to remarry Heinrey, the royal of the Western Kingdom played by Lee Jong Suk.
The series will premiere on Disney+ on November 4, with episodes one through four arriving on that day, followed by two new episodes every Wednesday, for a total of ten episodes. The new preview arrives just days before that launch, after a run of production stills released on October 26 that introduced the show’s visual world.
Those stills explain a great deal about how the preview is meant to be read. Disney+ presented the Eastern Empire and the Western Kingdom as visual opposites, with Navier’s spaces using red and yellow tones that deepen gradually to convey both the dignity of an empress and her inner loneliness, while Sovieshu’s spaces rely on blue, green and black to stress an emperor’s authority and the weight of the crown. Production designer Lee Tae-hoon said the team worked to distinguish each character’s world clearly while keeping everything organically connected.
Costume carries the same storytelling work. Navier wears showy, multicoloured outfits when she is with Sovieshu, but shifts to more restrained, softer clothing when she faces Heinrey, a change that tracks the shifting dynamics between the characters. Director Cho Soo-won said every prop was treated not as decoration but as a way to raise the realism and immersion of the world.
The bird itself, named Quin, received the same level of attention. To realise Heinrey’s bird form, the crew studied the appearance and movement of real birds, and considered how the bird would harmonise with Heinrey’s costume, hair colour and eyes, aiming for a balance between fantasy and realism. The new preview is the first moving test of that work that most viewers will have seen, after the stills version drew attention on October 26 for how closely the bird resembled Lee Jong Suk himself.
That context is what makes the new clip more than a cute gag. In the stills, Shin Min Ah was shown gently holding and petting the bird; in the preview, the relationship moves a step further, with Navier openly praising Heinrey’s looks and voice while unaware, or at least apparently unaware, that he is listening in feathered form. The dramatic irony gives the romance its engine: the audience knows what Navier does not, and Heinrey knows exactly how highly she rates him.
“The Remarried Empress” premieres on Disney+ on November 4.
