Choo Young-woo Broke Out Playing Two Men at Once. Now He Plays One

Choo Young-woo

Photo: K-POPIT 케이팝잇 TV10 / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 5, 1999 Seoul, South Korea
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Even If This Love Disappears Tonight
Awards	Baeksang Award · Blue Dragon Award · KBS Drama · APAN Star

For most of the run that made him, Choo Young-woo was asked to be two people with one face. In The Tale of Lady Ok he played a veiled travelling storyteller and also the near-identical man who later becomes the heroine’s husband, both tied to the same runaway slave living under a false name. In Head Over Heels he was a boy born under a fatal star and also the malevolent spirit lodged inside that boy. Korean television found in him an actor who could flip a switch behind the eyes, and it kept writing switches for him. The series he has on air now, the last one Ahn Pan-seok directed, takes the switch away.

In Between Steps, on ENA, he is Park Min-jae, a robotics doctoral student who swam competitively in high school until an illness cost him a leg. There is no double and no possession to hide behind. There is a man who struggles to say what he feels, a laboratory he runs for his professor, and Kim So-hyun as the master’s student who stumbles into it after her department brands her a troublemaker. Ahn was a director who let silences run long. Whether Choo can hold a scene with nothing to switch to is what this autumn is really testing.

He grew up close to a camera without being raised for one. His father, Choo Seung-il, is counted among South Korea’s first generation of professional fashion models, the cohort that included Cha Seung-won, and his mother also modelled. Seoul is where Choo was born, on June 5, 1999; he finished school at Hansol High in Sejong and needed a second attempt to get into university. When he did, it was the acting department of the School of Drama at the Korea National University of Arts, where he also acted in student short films. His younger brother, Cha Jung-woo, is an actor too, and stood in as his double on The Tale of Lady Ok.

The early credits came quickly and mostly in school uniform. A web series, You Make Me Dance, opened his career in 2021, followed the same year by a student officer in KBS’s Police University and a cool, withdrawn transfer student, Jung Young-joo, in School 2021. A one-act tvN drama, Babel Syndrome, gave him his first title role in 2022, and the Kakao TV romance Once Upon a Small Town, in which he played Han Ji-yul, won him an APAN Star Award for web-series acting. Then came Oasis, a KBS drama opposite Jang Dong-yoon and Seol In-ah, in which he played Choi Chul-woong. At the 2023 KBS Drama Awards he shared the best new actor prize with Lee Won-jeong and thanked the room with a deep traditional bow.

Nothing in that list predicted the scale of what followed. The Tale of Lady Ok, a JTBC historical drama starring Lim Ji-yeon as a slave who escapes and lives under a borrowed name, premiered on November 30, 2024, and closed in January 2025 at 13.6 percent nationwide, its highest rating. Choo’s storyteller, Cheon Seung-hwi, falls for her at first sight and keeps loving her after he learns who she is. While its final episodes aired, Netflix released The Trauma Code: Heroes on Call on January 24. He played Yang Jae-won, a fellow from a third-generation family of doctors who becomes the first disciple of Ju Ji-hoon’s trauma surgeon. Within ten days the series was the most-watched non-English show on Netflix worldwide, at number one in 17 countries.

The prizes caught up by spring. In May 2025 he won the Baeksang Arts Award for best new actor in television for The Tale of Lady Ok, and the Blue Dragon Series Awards gave him their best new actor prize for The Trauma Code. June brought two more shows in the same month: Netflix’s Mercy for None, an action noir led by So Ji-sub, where he played Lee Geum-son, an ambitious prosecutor, and tvN’s Head Over Heels, adapted from Ahn Su-min’s webtoon, which reunited him with his School 2021 co-star Cho Yi-hyun as a high-school shaman trying to save him from his fate.

That density is also the case against him. Four series premiering inside seven months built a face that Korean viewers could hardly avoid, and a good part of it was sold on duality: the double role, the comic doctor who is clumsy and capable at once, the boy and the demon. His first feature exposed what happens when there is only one register to play. Even If This Love Disappears from the World Tonight, Kim Hye-young’s Korean remake of Misaki Ichijo’s novel, opened on Christmas Eve 2025 opposite Shin Si-a and sold more than 800,000 tickets within a month, past its break-even point, before moving to Netflix. The reviews of Choo were divided. Some critics found his emotional range too even for a romance built on ache, and others noted that a teenager dying of a heart condition was being played by a visibly robust young man. He said he had lost about 13 kilograms by the end of the shoot and still looked sturdy on camera.

Hence the weight of this autumn. That is the gap Between Steps asks him to close. Written by Min Hyo-jung, whose credits include Full House, it premiered on October 5 and runs to 12 episodes on Monday and Tuesday nights, streaming alongside the broadcast on Genie TV and Disney+. Ahn Pan-seok, whose Something in the Rain and One Spring Night turned slow-burn courtship into a house style, finished filming and editing it before his death on August 12, at 64, after a brain haemorrhage. The series is now his farewell, and Choo is the face of it.

The switch returns on the next job. Netflix has confirmed Long Vacation, in which he plays Devil No. 3375, sent to Korea on a fresh assignment and lodging at a seaside hotel where Lee Se-young’s employee crosses his path. Lee Jung-hyo, who directed Crash Landing on You, is behind the camera, and no release date has been announced. Before the devil, though, come the remaining episodes of a man with one leg and nothing to hide behind, and they will say more about the actor than either face he wore in his breakout year.