Kim So-hyun Played Every Heroine’s Younger Self. Now She Plays Her Own

Kim So-hyun

Photo: TV10 / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 4, 1999 Australia
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Unforgettable, Killer Toon, The Last Princess
Awards	KBS Drama Awards Top Excellence Award, Actress · KBS Drama Awards Excellence Award, Actress in a Miniseries · Korea Drama Awards Star of the Year · K-Drama Star Awards Best Child Actress

At the press conference for Between Steps, Kim So-hyun did not start with her character. She started with Ahn Pan-seok, the director of Something in the Rain and One Spring Night, who finished shooting and cutting the series and died before it reached the air. He sat with the crew on set to argue over scenes, she said, and he helped her “open the doors that had been closed within me.” It is an odd admission from an actor with two decades of credits. It makes more sense coming from one who has been watched since childhood, by an audience that learned her face long before she had decided what to do with it.

Her story begins far from Seoul. Kim was born in Australia, and her family moved to South Korea when she was four; her father died when she was nine. She was still in primary school when a supporting part in a KBS Drama City special gave her a first credit, and she has said she never had formal acting training. What she had instead was an education on set, playing the younger self of somebody else’s heroine while fitting lessons around shooting days. After middle school she studied at home, passed the high school equivalency exams and later enrolled in the theatre department at Hanyang University.

The breakthrough came in miniature. Born on June 4, 1999, and on screen since 2006, she was 12 when Moon Embracing the Sun, the 2012 fantasy-period drama that peaked at a 42.2 percent rating, cast her as the young Yoon Bo-kyung, the antagonist. She made a child’s jealousy read as ambition. Rooftop Prince cast her as another scheming sister. In Missing You she was the young Lee Soo-yeon, a girl taunted as “the murderer’s daughter” who is abducted and assaulted, and the Korean press started calling her the queen of child actors. The same stretch brought her first lead, in the teen drama Ma Boy, and two years co-hosting MBC’s Show! Music Core.

The way out of child roles ran through doubles. In Who Are You: School 2015 she played twins, Lee Eun-bi and Go Eun-byul, and the KBS series won her Star of the Year at the Korea Drama Awards. On film she was the heroine of Pure Love, opposite Do Kyung-soo, and the teenage Princess Deokhye in The Last Princess, handing the part to Son Ye-jin for the adult years. A K-pop Herald critic singled out the scene in which the princess says goodbye to her mother. Yet even in a prestige period film, she was still the younger version.

Then she became the lead, and the lead was the hard part. The Emperor: Owner of the Mask, a political period drama opposite Yoo Seung-ho, drew high ratings in 2017, and Kim has described the seven months of filming as a slump. She said she felt lost, could not grasp who her heroine was, and was embarrassed by praise for a performance she did not yet understand. She left SidusHQ after seven years and set up a one-person agency. This is the chapter the “national little sister” story tends to skip: the public’s affection arrived before her own conviction did, and for a while the first ran well ahead of the second.

Netflix changed who was watching. Love Alarm, adapted from Chon Kye-young’s webtoon about an app that rings when someone nearby likes you, was the first Korean drama Netflix picked up as an original, and her Kim Jo-jo, a girl feeling love for the first time opposite Song Kang, introduced her to viewers who had never seen a KBS drama. The same year, The Tale of Nokdu, a Joseon romantic comedy with Jang Dong-yoon, earned her an Excellence Award at the KBS Drama Awards. The second season of Love Alarm landed badly; the South China Morning Post gave it two stars out of five and found even less story than the first time around.

Her strongest work came out of a production crisis. In early 2021, with roughly 90 percent of River Where the Moon Rises already filmed, co-star Ji Soo acknowledged school-bullying allegations and was removed from the KBS series. Na In-woo took over the male lead from the seventh episode, and Kim, who had the most scenes with him, spent about another month reshooting. Across the show she carried three identities, the assassin Yeom Ga-jin, Princess Pyeonggang and Queen Yeon. The result was a Baeksang Arts Award nomination for best television actress and a share, with Park Eun-bin, of the KBS Top Excellence Award.

Since then she has mostly chosen romance with a hook. In tvN’s My Lovely Liar, opposite Hwang Min-hyun, she played a woman who can hear every lie told around her, and the series became Viki’s most-watched title worldwide while it aired. Serendipity’s Embrace paired her with Chae Jong-hyeop as a woman who runs into her first love ten years on. In 2025 she switched register for Good Boy, the JTBC action comedy with Park Bo-gum, as Ji Han-na, a retired shooting champion who joins a special police recruitment drive; Prime Video carried it outside Korea.

Between Steps, which premiered on ENA on October 5 and streams on Disney+ abroad, is the plainest of these and the most exposed. She plays Lim Yu-jin, a clothing-and-textiles student whose department brands her a troublemaker and closes off graduate school, and who ends up in a robotics lab whose day-to-day manager is Choo Young-woo‘s Park Min-jae, a former swimmer who lost a leg to illness. Min Hyo-jung, who wrote Full House, scripted it; Ahn, who died in August, directed it in his slow, observational style. The ratings are modest, 2.36 percent on Nielsen in the opening week. Nobody is going to call it a child star’s vehicle.

The next test is stranger. Kim is shooting Modup, a Showbox occult mystery set in the 1960s on an island nobody visits, with Yoo Hae-jin, Im Si-wan and Lee Moo-saeng. She plays Seon-ok, who travels there hoping to cure an illness no one can explain. It is her first film in ten years and her first occult role, and it puts her back beside Im Si-wan, who was in Moon Embracing the Sun when she was the girl playing the villain. No release date has been announced.