Kim Ji-won, the Queen of Tears star who keeps walking away from the heiress

Kim Ji-won

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

Born	October 19, 1992 Seoul, South Korea
Occupation	Actress
Awards	SBS Drama Awards · 2 KBS Drama Awards · APAN Star Awards · Korea Drama Awards · Korean Popular Culture and Arts Awards

Two of the women Kim Ji-won is best known for playing were born rich. Rachel Yoo in The Heirs, a high-school heiress with a sharp tongue, introduced her to audiences across Asia. Hong Hae-in in Queen of Tears, the department-store chaebol daughter trapped in a failing marriage, made her one of the most-watched Korean actresses on Netflix. In between, and again now, she has gone looking for women who work for a living: an army doctor, an information-desk clerk who wants to be a television announcer, an office worker who can barely bring herself to speak, and a surgeon an agency rents out to a hospital that does not want her. The heiress is what sells. The working woman is where she keeps returning, and that tension runs through everything she has chosen since.

She grew up in Geumcheon District, in the south-west of Seoul, the younger of two daughters,. In her first year of middle school she was sent to live with relatives on her mother’s side in Chicago for most of a year. Back home she had to repeat a grade, then left formal schooling and passed the high-school equivalency exam instead. A talent scout stopped her on the street in her mid-teens, and she spent three years at Lion Media training to sing, dance and act. She played keyboard and sang backing vocals for the singer Younha, and she was being prepared for a pop debut under the name JessicaK when she decided she wanted to act.

Kim Ji-won was born on October 19, 1992, and her first appearance before the public was a 2010 phone commercial for LG alongside BigBang. In 2011 she enrolled in the theatre department of Dongguk University to study acting, made her film debut in the omnibus romance Romantic Heaven and joined the MBC sitcom High Kick: Revenge of the Short Legged, playing a character who shared her name.

The writer Kim Eun-sook gave her the two parts that made her face familiar abroad. In The Heirs (SBS, 2013), opposite Lee Min-ho, she played Rachel Yoo, the heiress engaged to his character, and won the New Star Award at the SBS Drama Awards; the series passed a billion views on China’s Youku. In Descendants of the Sun (KBS2, 2016) she was Yoon Myung-ju, an army surgeon in a slow-burning romance with Jin Goo’s master sergeant. The drama peaked at a 38.8 percent rating, and Kim took the Excellence Award at the KBS Drama Awards and best supporting actress at the APAN Star Awards. Korean outlets started calling her the “CF Queen” after she signed more than ten endorsement deals that year.

Her first lead came with Fight for My Way (KBS2, 2017), opposite Park Seo-joon, as Choi Ae-ra, a department-store information-desk employee who still wants to be an announcer. The series about young adults stuck in second-tier jobs finished at 13.8 percent and earned her a second KBS Excellence Award, and the Korean press began calling her the “Diction Fairy” for how clearly she delivered her lines. Arthdal Chronicles (tvN, 2019) reunited her with Song Joong-ki in a fantasy epic, with Kim as Tanya, heir to the priesthood of the Wahan tribe. In the web series Lovestruck in the City (2020) she played Lee Eun-oh, a woman living under a false identity, and learned to surf for the part despite a fear of water she had carried since childhood.

The work critics value most in her career drew the smallest audience. My Liberation Notes (JTBC, 2022), written by Park Hae-young, cast her as Yeom Mi-jeong, an introverted office worker who commutes to Seoul and finally asks a taciturn newcomer to her village, played by Son Suk-ku, to “worship” her. Its domestic ratings stayed in single digits, yet the role earned her a nomination for best actress in television at the Baeksang Arts Awards, and the actress praised for her diction made her strongest impression playing a woman who says almost nothing. The label Korean media handed her after her biggest hit, “Queen of Romantic Comedy,” flattens that record. So does the habit of reading her career through its two heiresses. Her exits tell a different story: she let two agency contracts lapse, with King Kong Entertainment and then Salt Entertainment, and she did not return for the second season of Arthdal Chronicles in 2023, in which Shin Se-kyung took over Tanya.

Queen of Tears (tvN, 2024), written by Park Ji-eun, paired her with Kim Soo-hyun as a couple whose marriage collapses before it can be saved. Its finale reached 24.9 percent nationwide, the highest figure any tvN drama had posted at that point, passing Crash Landing on You, and the series spent fifteen consecutive weeks in Netflix’s global top 10 for non-English series. She and Kim Soo-hyun won best couple at the Korea Drama Awards, Gallup Korea ranked her the third television actor of the year in 2024 and again in 2025, and in 2025 she received the Prime Minister’s Commendation at the Korean Popular Culture and Arts Awards. Bulgari named her its first Korean ambassador across jewelry, watches and fragrance.

For her next series she waited two and a half years and chose a remake. Doctor X: Mafia in White, SBS’s adaptation of the TV Asahi franchise Doctor-X, premiered on SBS and Netflix on October 9, 2026, with Kim as Gye Su-jeong, a freelance surgeon placed by a physician-for-hire agency in a university hospital run on ego and favors. The comparison with Ryoko Yonekura, who played the Japanese original for more than a decade, comes with the role. Director Lee Jung-rim leads the series, and HighZium Studio, the agency Kim joined in 2022, is among its producers. The twelve episodes air on Fridays and Saturdays through November 14.

Kim keeps her private life out of interviews. She has said she separates work from the rest of her life because she wants viewers watching her dramas to see only the character. Away from sets, her public life runs mostly through donations: 50 million won for victims of the 2025 wildfires, and in August 2026 100 million won to Seoul National University Children’s Hospital for ward improvements and treatment costs for families of children with rare diseases.

The next role is a working woman who actually existed. Kim is attached to lead Detective Park Mi-ok, a series about the policewoman who became the first woman to lead a violent-crimes detective team in South Korea, written by Chung Seo-kyung, the screenwriter of Little Women, and directed by Kim Hee-won, who directed Queen of Tears.