Kim You-jung, the nation’s little sister who learned to lie on screen

Kim You-jung

Photo: TV10 / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 22, 1999 Seongdong District, Seoul, South Korea
Occupation	Actress
Known for	The Chaser, Lady Vengeance, 20th Century Girl
Awards	3 SBS Drama Awards · MBC Drama Awards · KBS Drama Awards · Baeksang Award · Asia Artist Awards

Kim You-jung was trusted by Korean audiences before she could read a script on her own. For most of her life on screen she has played the girl who means exactly what her face shows, from the child chosen as crown princess and then erased from the court in Moon Embracing the Sun to the first love an entire generation of viewers remembers. The work she has chosen lately runs the other way. Her characters now lie for a living, and the question her career keeps asking is whether a face the country watched grow up is allowed to deceive it.

The press handed her the labels early. Through childhood she was the nation’s little sister; a Netflix romance set at the end of the last century later made her the nation’s first love. Every one of those nicknames is affectionate. Every one of them also describes what the public would like her to stay.

Her first job was a commercial for Crown Confectionery, at four. She had been born in Seongdong District, Seoul, on 22 September 1999, and by 2003 she was acting. The credits piled up: the little girl Eun-ji in Na Hong-jin‘s thriller The Chaser in 2008, then the young heroine of the palace saga Dong Yi in 2010. SBS named her best young actress in 2008, and MBC did the same two years later for Dong Yi.

The role that fixed her image came in 2012. In MBC’s Moon Embracing the Sun she played Heo Yeon-woo as a girl, opposite Yeo Jin-goo as the young prince, and the drama went on to national ratings above 40 per cent. Her teenage years were spent in that shadow, in Secret Door, which earned her SBS’s New Star Award in 2014, and Angry Mom a year later.

The move to adult leads arrived in costume and in disguise, which in hindsight reads like a thesis. In Love in the Moonlight, broadcast on KBS2 in 2016, she was Hong Ra-on, a girl raised as a boy who ends up serving in the palace as a eunuch, opposite Park Bo-gum’s crown prince. It brought her the Excellence Award at the KBS Drama Awards and the Most Popular Actress prize at the Baeksang Arts Awards the following spring,. Its pull has not faded: in September 2026 KBS2 aired a two-part anniversary reunion of the cast, an idea Park himself proposed.

What came next was less tidy. In February 2018, just after she graduated from Goyang High School of Arts, it was disclosed that she had a thyroid disorder and would step back from acting. She returned late that year in the romantic comedy Clean with Passion for Now, then led Backstreet Rookie on SBS in 2020 and the fantasy period piece Lovers of the Red Sky in 2021, which won her SBS’s Top Excellence Award and a Best Couple prize with Ahn Hyo-seop.

Backstreet Rookie is the credit her career story tends to skip, and it is where the trust she carried first worked against her. The series was adapted from an adult webtoon yet sold as a family romantic comedy. Its first episode, in which her underage character Jung Saet-byul kisses the convenience store’s adult manager, played by Ji Chang-wook, drew complaints that it was unfit to watch with the family. The Korea Communications Standards Commission opened a review and later issued a formal warning over the show’s repeated slang and swearing. SBS gave her an Excellence Award that December anyway. It exposed how narrow her lane had become: an actress whose image was frozen in childhood, aged 20, cast as a minor in a story written for adults.

Netflix offered a wider audience. 20th Century Girl, written and directed by Bang Woo-ri, premiered at the Busan International Film Festival on 6 October 2022 and reached the platform worldwide on 21 October, with Kim as Na Bo-ra, a high-school girl in 1999, opposite Byeon Woo-seok. In January 2023 she made her stage debut as Viola de Lesseps in the Korean premiere of Shakespeare in Love, and at the end of that year she played Do Do-hee, a guarded heiress, against Song Kang‘s demon in SBS’s My Demon. It earned another Top Excellence Award and another Best Couple trophy, which she accepted alone.

Her trophy shelf is crowded with youth prizes, network year-end awards and couple awards, and Gallup Korea ranked her fourth among the country’s entertainers of 2023. The Baeksang, the prize the industry treats as its serious verdict, has only ever given her its popularity award.

Then she broke the pattern on purpose. In Dear X, a TVING original directed by Lee Eung-bok that premiered on 6 November 2025 and streamed on HBO Max across 17 Asia-Pacific territories, she played Baek Ah-jin, the country’s top actress, who hides a cruel nature behind her beauty and discards the people she breaks. A former child star playing a celebrity who performs innocence was not subtle casting, and Kim leaned into it. She called the character a devil with the face of an angel and said she tried to strip away unnecessary expressions and leave space for subtlety. The entertainment outlet Tenasia called it her most compelling role yet. The Baeksang nominations in April 2026 left the series out entirely, an omission the Korean press reported as a snub. The Asia Artist Awards and the ContentAsia Awards did not look away.

The work since has kept testing that edge. In Baek Jong-yeol’s Reawakened Man, released in September 2026 with Koo Kyo-hwan in the lead, she appears as Blue, a character invented for the film, and never speaks. The director said he withheld her dialogue to the end to keep the character’s intensity and the sense that more story remains.

On 10 October 2026, tvN premiered 100 Days of Deception, a 16-episode weekend drama directed by Yoo In-shik and written by Ryu Bo-ri, on TVING in Korea and Netflix abroad. Kim plays Lee Ga-kyeong, the best pickpocket in colonial-era Gyeongseong, recruited by the independence movement and slipped into the Japanese Government-General disguised as an interpreter trainee. Kim Hyun-joo‘s sniper hands her a cover name, and Park Jinyoung plays the Government-General’s elite interpreter, Sato Hideo. At the launch in Seoul she said the script made simply taking part feel like an honour, and admitted the language work had frightened her at first.

The drama airs on Saturday and Sunday nights, and its premise asks Ga-kyeong to sell a false identity to the most suspicious people in the country for a hundred days. Kim You-jung has set herself a similar test: keep the audience that fell for her sincerity while convincing them, scene after scene, that she is lying.