Go Min-si, the Smugglers actress whose roles keep arriving while she stays offstage

Go Min-si

Photo: Marie Claire Korea / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 15, 1995 Daejeon, South Korea
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Decision to Leave, The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion, The Battle: Roar to Victory
Awards	Blue Dragon Award · Buil Film · Chunsa Film Art · SBS Drama · KBS Drama · Asian Academy Creative Award, Best Actress in a Supporting Role

Last week Netflix released a horror series in which Go Min-si plays an investigator who will not stop asking questions about a staffing agency that pays far too well. The actress was not at the press conference in Seoul to talk about her. She had not been at the Busan screenings either, where her co-star Lee Jae-wook, now doing military service, used his leave to sit quietly in the audience. Her agency and Netflix said she was busy shooting another project, and the record bears that out: the work has not stopped. What has stopped is the public half of a Korean screen career, the photo walls and the interviews, ever since an anonymous post accused her of bullying classmates at school, a charge she denies outright.

It is an odd position for someone who began by putting herself in front of the camera before anyone else would. Her first credit of note is a short film she wrote, directed and starred in, Parallel Novel, made for a festival devoted to films that last exactly three minutes. It won the grand prize there. The directing never became a career, but the instinct it showed, to build the scene rather than wait to be placed in one, runs through the roles that came after.

Go was born on February 15, 1995, in Daejeon, and broke through in 2016 with an appearance in the third season of 72 Seconds, the bite-sized web drama that served as a casting window for a generation of Korean actors. Television followed quickly. She made her network debut in the SBS period drama My Sassy Girl in 2017, then spent two busy years in the supporting ranks, from Hello, My Twenties! 2 to the police drama Live, and played the heroine’s best friend Myung-hee in Park Hoon-jung’s action film The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion, which brought a Grand Bell nomination for best supporting actress. Netflix’s Love Alarm cast her as the lead’s cousin, and the SBS thriller Secret Boutique earned her the network’s best new actress prize in 2019.

The role that carried her abroad was Lee Eun-yu in Sweet Home, the Netflix monster series adapted from the Naver webtoon. Eun-yu is a former ballerina whose career ended with a foot injury, the sharp-tongued adoptive sister of Lee Do-hyun’s character, and Go kept her abrasive long after the apocalypse made sweetness the easier choice. She stayed with the show through all three seasons, until 2024. Her first true lead came in 2021 with Youth of May on KBS2, again opposite Lee Do-hyun: she played Kim Myung-hee, a nurse in Gwangju in the spring of 1980, in a love story that unfolds in the days before the uprising and its suppression. The drama won her the KBS excellence award for a miniseries actress, and the same year she reunited with Sweet Home director Lee Eung-bok on Jirisan.

Cinema caught up in 2023. Ryoo Seung-wan cast her as Go Ok-bun in Smugglers, a 1970s crime caper led by Kim Hye-soo and Yum Jung-ah, and she held her own beside two veterans of Korean cinema. The part brought the Blue Dragon Film Award for best new actress, plus best new actress at the Chunsa Film Art Awards and best supporting actress at the Buil Film Awards. A year earlier she had appeared for a few minutes as a shaman in Park Chan-wook‘s Decision to Leave. Audiences also met her without a character, as the intern in the second season of the restaurant reality show Jinny’s Kitchen.

The Frog, Mo Wan-il’s Netflix thriller from 2024, gave her the most unsettling role of her career: Yoo Seong-a, the mysterious guest whose arrival at a quiet guesthouse run by Kim Yoon-seok’s character upends his life. It earned her a Baeksang Arts Award nomination for best television actress the following spring. She switched register entirely for Tastefully Yours, created by Han Jun-hee and broadcast on ENA in May 2025, playing Mo Yeon-joo, a stubborn chef who runs a one-table restaurant without a sign in Jeonju, opposite Kang Ha-neul.

That romance was still on air when the allegations surfaced. In May 2025 a writer who claimed to be a former middle-school classmate posted that Go had verbally abused and extorted peers and mocked students with disabilities. Her agency, Mystic Story, called the claims clearly false, hired lawyers and announced civil and criminal action. At the end of August she spoke for herself: she admitted to a reckless adolescence and small acts of defiance, then wrote, “I can say with certainty that I have never committed school violence,” adding that she had submitted every document she could to investigators. It was not the first time her teenage years had followed her; in 2021 she apologised after photos of her drinking as a minor surfaced online. No result of the investigation has been made public. And in the Korean industry that matters less than it should: an unproven accusation does not need a verdict to cost an actor her visibility, and Go’s strategy has been to let the work speak while she stays out of the frame.

The work has kept coming. Yoon Ga-eun’s The World of Love, in which Go plays Han Mi-do, premiered in the Platform competition at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2025 and opened in Korean cinemas that October. In January 2026 her agency confirmed she had joined Moral Family, Lee Seung-won’s film about four siblings adapted from a play, as Kim Seon-ji, the cool, decisive eldest sibling who heads the family, with filming scheduled to start the following month. And on October 30, 2026, Netflix released all eight episodes of Dead-End Job, directed by Kim Da-min with Han Jun-hee again as creative lead. Go plays Eum Yeon-joo, an accident investigator from a labour-disaster protection agency who circles the Spyder staffing office, where temp jobs pay fifty times the going rate, and keeps pressing Lee Jae-wook’s debt-ridden Hyuk-jun about what really happens there. Speaking to the Korean press about the role, she said she had been won over by the character’s courage in trying to change a world where certain bitter things never change.

Her next credits are already in line, with Moral Family and the drama A Good House to Live In both attached to her name. Go Min-si will keep working; the casting sheets settle that. Still unsettled is whether, once investigators report, she steps back onto the stage where Korean audiences expect to meet their stars, or whether a fictional investigator remains the only version of her the public gets to watch.

Featured Films

Decision to Leave (2022) — Smugglers (2023) — as Go Ok-boon

Tags: actors, actresses, Dead-End Job, Lee Jae-wook, Go Min-si, Lee Do-hyun, Sweet Home

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