Ha Ji Won Spending Time at a Ping Pong Center

Wonder what Ha Ji Won’s been up to these days? It turns out she’s been honing her ping pong skills every day with former Korean gold medalist Hyun Jung Hwa. According to local media, the star actress from SBS “Secret Garden” has been training three hours a day in preparation of her upcoming movie, “Korea,” a sports flick based on a true story of the first-ever unified Korean national ping pong team in 1991.

“Ha Ji Won never really played ping pong before so she’s feeling a lot of pressure to play the role of Hyun Jung Hwa (main character who won the gold medal). But she’s slowly getting better, learning from the basics like how to place a serve. The movie includes a lot of dynamic scenes of her actually playing ping pong, so she’s working extra hard to create scenes as realistic as possible. Ping pong is a sport that requires more physical strength than you think, and she gets totally exhausted after each training session,” an inside source told local media.

In the movie “Korea,” Ha Ji Won stars as Hyun Jung Hwa, the gold medalist for the first-ever unified Korean ping pong team at the 1991 World Championships. She’s reportedly getting private lessons directly from Hyun Jung Hwa and a group of officials from the Korea Table Tennis Association at a ping pong center located in Anyang, a southern city of Seoul. The unified Korean national team beat rival China in dramatic fashion to win the gold medal at the 1991 tournament.

Ha Ji Won is well-known for her intense training before shooting any film or drama. It was reported that she took aerobic lessons for three months before the movie “Sex is Zero,” and she enrolled in boxing classes, almost breaking her nose, prior to shooting the movie “Miracle on 1^st Street.”  For dramas “Damo” and “Hwang Jin Yi,” she learned tightrope dancing and a Korean martial arts called “Sun Mu Do,” while she finished all the technical wire action scenes in drama “Secret Garden” without any substitutes. All the more reason to check out this movie!