Han So-hee, the actress who arrived as the villain and never quite left

Han So-hee

Photo: 티비텐 / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 18, 1993 Ulsan, South Korea
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Japanese Mom
Awards	Rookie of the Year, Asia Artist Awards (2020) · Best Actress nomination, 58th Baeksang Arts Awards (2022)

Something strange happened in 2020 on South Korean cable television: viewers of a drama about marital infidelity found themselves pulling for the character they were expressly invited to despise. Han So-hee was playing Yeo Da-kyung, a young woman who enters a settled marriage and upends it, and the script offered her nothing by way of sympathy. She played it anyway — raw, sure of herself, unashamed — and the ratings went somewhere Korean cable had never been.

She was born Lee So-hee in Ulsan in 1993 and moved to Seoul in her final year of high school to live with her grandmother, taking on part-time work to get by. She studied arts and spent her early twenties in the way most Korean actresses who will later be everywhere spend their late teens: doing music videos, modeling for CJ Group and Banila Co., taking supporting parts in dramas nobody would remember her from. Money Flower in 2017. 100 Days My Prince in 2018. Abyss in 2019. The parts were small and the roles were decorative.

The World of the Married, the 2020 JTBC drama adapted from the BBC series Doctor Foster, was not supposed to make her. She was cast as a supporting antagonist. The lead — Kim Hee-ae, playing the betrayed wife — had the story. What Han So-hee had was a single function in the narrative: to be the reason the marriage ended. Instead, something in her performance created a competing center of gravity, and the show ended as the highest-rated drama in Korean cable television history, with an audience that had apparently decided to watch two different things at once.

Han So-hee. Photo by Marie Claire Korea, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

What followed was not the straightforward ascent the ratings suggested. My Name, her 2021 Netflix action series, showed her in a different register entirely: a woman who joins a criminal organization to avenge her father’s murder and burns through the story on operational rage rather than emotional expression. She was nominated for Best Actress at the 58th Baeksang Arts Awards for it. Nevertheless, also in 2021, put her back in emotional territory — a JTBC romance about wanting what you know is bad for you — and found an audience that responded to her specifically, not just to the genre.

Gyeongseong Creature in 2023 and 2024 took the scale further: a Netflix two-part series set during the Japanese colonial period, with monsters, wartime violence, and Park Seo-joon as her co-lead. It was expansive, expensive, and internationally distributed. It also showed where her career was heading — away from the confined domestic drama that made her and toward productions that treat Korean genre storytelling as a global commodity.

The critical question about Han So-hee’s career is whether the thing that made her famous — the ability to inhabit morally ambiguous women without softening them — is a skill or a limitation. Project Y, her January 2026 crime film co-starring Jeon Jong-seo, was the first major evidence for the second reading: the film moved to video-on-demand just sixteen days after its theatrical release, with cumulative ticket sales barely reaching 140,000 in its second week. Han has said publicly that she chose the project because she felt she was falling into a rut. That’s a candid admission that the instinct which got her here — take the role most likely to surprise — doesn’t always produce the result.

What she has confirmed next positions her differently. A Korean remake of the 2015 Hollywood film The Intern, produced by Warner Bros. Korea and directed by Kim Do Young — who made Kim Ji Young, Born 1982 — began filming in September 2025. Han plays Seon-woo, the CEO of a fashion company who hires a retired professional named Gi-ho, played by Choi Min-sik, as an intern. It is a comedy about institutional friction and generational encounter: not the kind of work anyone would have predicted from her, which is presumably exactly the point.

Han So-hee began as a model and took a decade to become a lead actress. She became famous by playing the villain the audience couldn’t hate. The Intern remake will be the first real test of whether she can hold the center of a story that doesn’t need her to carry any moral ambiguity — a story where the audience simply needs to like her. Everything before it has been built on people not being sure how to feel. That uncertainty was the engine. The question now is what replaces it.