Park Seo-jun, the rom-com king who has spent a decade trying to abdicate

Park Seo-jun

Photo: 디스패치 / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 16, 1988 Seoul, South Korea
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Parasite, The Marvels, Be With You
Awards	Grand Bell Award · Korean Film Critics Association Best New Actor · Korea Drama Awards Best New Actor · SBS Drama Awards Best New Actor · APAN Star Awards Top Excellence in Miniseries · Asian Film Awards Rising Star

Korean television has a precise idea of what a romantic lead should be, and for a few seasons Park Seo-jun was its most exact embodiment: the delayed half-smile, the confession held back until the penultimate episode, the ease that could make a narcissistic corporate heir look like a reasonable choice of husband. The Korean press gave him a title for it, “master of romantic comedy”. Nearly every decision he has made since has been an attempt to make that title obsolete.

The two jobs at the top of his slate show how far the project has gone. For Disney+ he has just finished playing Paeng-i, a criminal who thrives in a lawless city in the middle of a redevelopment frenzy, the first outright villain of his career. He walked off that set and straight onto one run by Lee Joon-ik, the director of The King and the Clown, to play a detective digging into a massacre the state preferred to forget. Neither part asks him to be liked.

He was born Park Yong-kyu in Seoul on December 16, 1988, and the stage reached him sideways. In middle school he joined an animation club almost by accident; its once-a-year performance put him in front of a room in which everyone was looking at him, and he never quite got over the feeling. It sent him to the acting department of the Seoul Institute of the Arts, which turned out to be less comfortable than the stage. Overwhelmed by the constant crowd and frustrated that the acting was not coming together, he decided in 2008 to get his military service out of the way first. He served it on active duty in a security guard battalion at the Cheongju Correctional Facility, a prison posting that sits oddly beside the glossy roles that followed. He never went back to finish the degree.

His screen career started small and fast. In 2011 he appeared in the music video for Bang Yong-guk’s “I Remember” and played a minor part, Chil-goo, in the baseball film Perfect Game. Dream High 2 on KBS2 gave him a place in a regular drama cast in 2012. The weekend family serial Pots of Gold won him a new-actor prize at the Korea Drama Awards, and the marital drama One Warm Word brought SBS’s New Star award. His first lead came on tvN in Witch’s Romance in 2014, opposite Uhm Jung-hwa. Between October 2013 and April 2015 he also hosted KBS’s weekly chart show Music Bank, the kind of tireless, presentable visibility the Korean industry uses to turn a newcomer into a familiar face before it has decided what to do with him.

It decided in 2015. In Kill Me, Heal Me he played Oh Ri-on, a mystery novelist and the twin brother of Hwang Jung-eum’s psychiatry resident, a supporting role beside Ji Sung’s heir with seven personalities that drew more attention than its size suggested. She Was Pretty reunited him with Hwang the same year, this time as the lead: Ji Sung-joon, a demanding deputy editor at a fashion magazine who fails to recognise the childhood friend working under him. On the big screen he played a young detective in the thriller The Chronicles of Evil and one of the many faces of a man who wakes up in a different body every morning in The Beauty Inside.

The period drama Hwarang: The Poet Warrior Youth, broadcast on KBS2 from December 2016, put him in an ensemble with Park Hyung-sik, Go Ara and BTS member V, a friendship with V that has long outlived the series and later moved into variety television. Fight for My Way (2017) was the first real notice of a different register. As Ko Dong-man, a former taekwondo athlete whose career ended badly and who tries mixed martial arts when everyone around him has settled for less, he played frustration with genuine weight, opposite Kim Ji-won, and the KBS2 series topped its time slot.

The same summer he took his first leading role in a film. Midnight Runners, directed by Kim Joo-hwan, paired him with Kang Ha-neul as two police academy students who stumble onto a kidnapping ring, drew more than five and a half million admissions and earned him best new actor at both the Grand Bell Awards and the Korean Association of Film Critics Awards. It also left a mark he rarely discusses. The film set its gang in Daerim-dong, a Seoul district with a large Chinese-Korean population, and residents protested from the opening weeks. About sixty of them sued the production company, Movie Rock; the first court sided with freedom of expression, and in 2020 an appeals court recommended that the company formally apologise. Park was not a party to the case, but the hit that made him a film star remains one of the most contested depictions of a minority in recent Korean cinema.

Park Seo-jun as Lee Young-joon in What’s Wrong with Secretary Kim (2018) — What’s Wrong with Secretary Kim (2018)

What’s Wrong with Secretary Kim (tvN, 2018) was the commercial peak of the first version of him. As Lee Young-joon, a vice-chairman so in love with himself that he cannot imagine his secretary, played by Park Min-young, resigning for any reason other than him, he turned vanity into a comic engine and gave the genre its most quoted lead of the year. The series travelled at precisely the moment international platforms were learning what Korean television could sell abroad. He followed it with the occult action film The Divine Fury (2019), as Yong-hu, a mixed martial arts champion who discovers he can fight demons, and with a cameo that outlasted most of his starring work: Min-hyuk, the friend who arrives with a scholar’s rock and hands his tutoring job to Ki-woo at the very start of Bong Joon-ho‘s Parasite, the film that went on to win the Palme d’Or and the Oscar for best picture.

Then came Itaewon Class (JTBC, 2020), adapted from Jo Gwang-jin’s webtoon and the role that split his career in two. Park Sae-ro-yi is expelled from school for punching the heir of a food conglomerate, loses his father to that same heir in a hit-and-run, goes to prison for attacking him and comes out with one plan: open a bar in Itaewon and spend fifteen years taking the family company apart. The part required sustained, patient anger from an actor known for softening scenes. The chestnut buzz cut became a national talking point, the series streamed worldwide on Netflix, Japan remade it as Roppongi Class, and Park earned a nomination for best television actor at the Baeksang Arts Awards. More importantly, it taught casting directors that he could carry a revenge story, and every role since has drawn on that lesson.

The image has its own fault lines. An interview he gave in 2014 about his “ideal type”, in which he said he wanted a wife who would stay at home to raise the children because he had grown up that way and believed children need their mother, has resurfaced online more than once since he became an export, and each time it has been read as old-fashioned by the very audience of young women who had embraced his attentive on-screen men. No formal statement followed. When a Taiwanese outlet reported in May 2024 that he was dating the American actress and artist Lauren Tsai, his agency, Awesome ENT, neither confirmed nor denied it and said it could not speak to his private life beyond his official schedule. The distance between the man Korean screens built and the one who occasionally surfaces in an old quote is part of what his more recent choices seem to be negotiating.

His Hollywood debut was the clearest test of how far the Itaewon Class reputation could travel. Nia DaCosta said she cast him as Prince Yan in The Marvels (2023) after watching the series during the pandemic. Yan is the prince of Aladna, a planet where people communicate in song, and the role lasted roughly three to four minutes on screen. Fans in Korea and abroad complained about the size of the part; Park answered that it was a crucial piece of the overall story. The film underperformed, but it put his name in front of audiences who had never seen a Korean drama.

At home the same year was crowded. In Lee Byeong-heon’s Dream he played Yoon Hong-dae, a professional footballer pushed into coaching the national team at the Homeless World Cup, opposite IU. In Um Tae-hwa’s disaster thriller Concrete Utopia he was Min-seong, a young husband in the one apartment block left standing after an earthquake flattens Seoul, alongside Lee Byung-hun and Park Bo-young; the film was chosen as South Korea’s entry for the 96th Academy Awards. In February 2023 he donated 100 million won to the Hope Bridge National Disaster Relief Association for victims of the earthquake in Turkey and Syria.

Gyeongseong Creature on Netflix took the darker register into genre territory. Released in two parts in December 2023 and January 2024, it cast him as Jang Tae-sang, the richest pawnbroker in Japanese-ruled Seoul in the spring of 1945, drawn into a hunt through a hospital where the occupiers experiment on prisoners, opposite Han So-hee. Early reviews were mixed and complaints about its slow pace were loud, but the series reached viewers in Japan who said it was the first time they had heard of Unit 731. The second season, released on September 27, 2024, moved the story to present-day Seoul and gave him a new man, Ho-jae, who carries Tae-sang’s face.

Surely Tomorrow, which ran for twelve episodes on JTBC and Prime Video from December 6, 2025 to January 11, 2026, was a partial return to romance, built on memory and loss rather than first meetings. He played Lee Kyeong-do, a journalist who meets his former girlfriend, played by Won Ji-an, again while reporting on her husband’s scandal. The reception was cooler than his peak years: the South China Morning Post called it a muted comeback, and the ending divided viewers, which Park defended in interviews as a story about holding on to the present moment.

Variety television has been the steady counterweight to all of this. He worked the kitchen in Youn’s Kitchen and in Jinny’s Kitchen, where V joined him again, and in May 2026 tvN launched Unplanned Trip: Limited Edition, which sent him across Korea with Jung Yu-mi and Choi Woo-shik without their phones and on a budget of 100,000 won each. In September 2026, marking fifteen years since his debut, he told fans on Instagram that he had just wrapped one project and was already on his way to the next.

The project he wrapped is Born Guilty, a Disney+ crime-action noir written and directed by Hong Won-chan, who made Deliver Us from Evil. Set in the 1980s as a city tears itself down ahead of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, it follows Paeng-i, the era’s most feared criminal, and a survival-minded gangster, with Um Tae-goo and Jo Hye-joo in the cast; Disney+ has slated it for 2027. The one he started is I Am a Firefly, a working title for Lee Joon-ik’s new film, in which he plays Seol Jun-gyeong, a detective in 1974 whose promotion has been blocked by the guilt-by-association system and who follows a mysterious old man, played by Park Hae-il, to a village where a massacre of the National Bodo League from the summer of 1950 has been buried for twenty-four years. Choi Dae-hoon plays a deputy director of the intelligence agency. It is his first film since Concrete Utopia and his first with Lee.

A decade ago Korean television had a finished product in Park Seo-jun and asked only that he keep making it. The next two times audiences see him, he will be a criminal grown fat on the redevelopment boom and a policeman reopening a crime the dictatorship ordered forgotten. The real test of whether the reinvention has worked comes when one of those parts asks him for the half-smile again and he has to decide whether to use it.