Woo Young-woo’s actual model, a world-renowned zoologist diagnosed with autism at the age of 2
The actual model of Woo Young-woo (Park Eun-bin), a lawyer with autism spectrum disorder in the popular drama “Extraordinary Attorney Woo”, has been revealed.
On July 24th, Hankook Ilbo reported that the production team of ENA’s “Extraordinary Attorney Woo” captured the character Woo Young-woo in the drama by referring to the life of Temple Grandin, a professor at Colorado State University (USA) who grew up from an autistic child to a global zoologist.
Temple Grandin was diagnosed with autism at the age of two.
The doctor said, “You have to stay in a care facility for the rest of your life and it will be hard for you to even speak.” However, Temple Grandin received a doctorate in zoology with the help of her mother and school teachers.
Temple Grandin showed her talent in animal research.
The humanitarian facilities she designed to ease the pain of farm animals have been introduced on 60% of farms in North America.
Temple Grandin was selected as one of the “100 most influential people in the world” by the American news magazine Time in 2010 for this achievement.
Her life was made into movies and books in the United States. In Korea, plays highlighting her life have been on the stage steadily since 2019.
Temple Grandin, dressed as a cowboy, gave a TED lecture on the theme of “The world needs all kinds of minds” in February 2013. She said, “The problem is that the world is too abstract these days, such as policy and construction. Autistic thinking, focusing on details that most people ignore, changes the world.”
In a phone call with Hankook Ilbo, Kim Byung-gun, a professor at Korea Nazarene University’s Department of Early Childhood Special Education, who served as an advisor of “Extraordinary Attorney Woo”, shared, “Although there are problems with empathy and communication, I wanted to break the stereotyped framework of autistic people who are lacking or only receiving help by approaching the high concentration that some people with autism spectrum disorder show in certain fields. Woo Young-woo’s image in court referred to Professor Grandin’s TED lecture.”
In that way, along with writer Moon Ji-won, he made the character three-dimensional in such a way that revealed more of Woo Young-woo’s autistic tendency in her daily life and maximized her intelligence when she defended.
Meanwhile, “Extraordinary Attorney Woo” tells the survival story of Woo Young-woo, a rookie lawyer who has a genius brain and autism spectrum disorder, at law firm Hanbada. It airs every Wednesday and Thursday at 9 PM.
Source: insight
