ENA’s upcoming thriller The Scarecrow is already making waves before its premiere, and one preview clip is all it took. Park Hae Soo and Lee Hee Joon reunite on screen — but this time, the chemistry is anything but warm.

The Scarecrow: Show at a Glance

Detail	Info
Show	The Scarecrow
Network / Platform	ENA / Viki
Premiere Date	April 20, 2026 at 10 PM KST
Lead Cast	Park Hae Soo, Lee Hee Joon
Genre	Crime Thriller / Mystery
Time Span	1988 – 2019 (30 years)

What Is The Scarecrow About?

Set across three decades, The Scarecrow follows Kang Tae Joo (Park Hae Soo) — a sharp, instinct-driven detective who gets demoted from Seoul and reassigned to his hometown of Gangseong. There, he’s handed a brutal serial murder case. The catch? The prosecutor in charge is Cha Si Young (Lee Hee Joon) — the very classmate who made his school life a living nightmare.

It’s a forced, deeply uncomfortable partnership between a man still carrying decades of trauma and the one who caused it.

The The Scarecrow: Tension You Can Feel Through the Screen

The newly released clip captures the raw electricity of their reunion. While Kang Tae Joo is visibly seething — old wounds torn wide open — Cha Si Young greets him with a composed, almost cheerful smile, acting as though nothing ever happened between them. It’s infuriating, calculated, and completely riveting to watch.

Later, the two cross paths again at a crime scene late at night, and the tension between them is absolutely palpable. Two men. One case. A lifetime of unresolved hatred.

Real-Life Friends, On-Screen Rivals

What makes this drama even more fascinating is the off-screen reality. This is actually Park Hae Soo and Lee Hee Joon’s third collaboration, and the two are close friends who first met doing theatre together nearly 20 years ago.

Park Hae Soo praised his co-star saying Lee Hee Joon naturally analyzes characters with deep imagination and is always self-reflecting as both an actor and a person. Lee Hee Joon, in turn, described Park Hae Soo as someone whose energy effortlessly makes everyone around him smile, calling him incredibly focused and sincere about his craft.

Real-life warmth playing against on-screen hatred? That’s elite acting at its finest.

This kind of nuanced crime drama storytelling — rooted in personal trauma, moral ambiguity, and long-simmering vengeance — is exactly what makes Korean thrillers stand apart on the global stage.