Lee Se-young, the Korean Actress Who Swapped the Court Lady for the Usurper

Lee Se-young

Photo: 티비텐 TV10 / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 20, 1992 Seoul, South Korea
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Hot Young Bloods, Seoul Vibe, All About My Wife
Awards	Baeksang Award · KBS Drama Awards Best New Actress · 2 MBC Drama Awards Top Excellence Award, Actress in a Miniseries · MBC Drama Awards Best Actor

For most of her adult career, Lee Se-young has played women who say no to power. The best known of them, the court lady Sung Deok-im in The Red Sleeve, spends an entire series telling a king that she would rather keep her own small life than become his concubine. In The Remarried Empress, the Korean series now streaming on Disney+, she plays Rashta, a runaway slave who wants exactly what Deok-im refused: the emperor, the palace and, in the end, the crown of the woman already wearing it.

It is the most deliberate turn yet from an actress who has worked in front of a camera since she was a small child, and who learned early that Korean television rewards the faces viewers trust. Lee is betting that the same trust can carry a villain. At the Seoul press presentation for the series she described Rashta as a nasty character who is still impossible to hate, something she said she had not been able to show for a while.

The reason she ended up on sets at all has become part of her public story. Lee, a native of Seoul’s Seocho District who turns 34 in December, has said on the MBC talk show Radio Star that her parents put her into acting because they were frightened by the child kidnappings that shook South Korea in the early 1990s, and reasoned that a well-known face would be harder to take.

By the age of ten she was playing the young Geum-yeong, the heroine’s rival, in Jewel in the Palace, the period drama that carried Korean television across Asia. The films When I Turned Nine and Lovely Rivals followed in 2004 and made her one of the most recognisable child performers of the decade. She studied media communications at Sungshin Women’s University while working through the awkward stretch every former child star faces, with supporting parts in Missing You, Goddess of Marriage and the period comedy Hot Young Bloods.

The adult breakthrough came through a weekend family drama, the format that still reaches the most living rooms in Korea. The Gentlemen of Wolgyesu Tailor Shop, broadcast on KBS2 in 2016, turned her and co-star Hyun Woo into a fan-named couple and won her the Baeksang Arts Award for best new actress in television the following spring, an odd title for someone with almost two decades of credits. The Hong sisters then cast her in A Korean Odyssey, where she played several characters inside one series, and in 2019 tvN gave her the queen in The Crowned Clown, the series version of the film Masquerade. Genre work followed, from the hospital drama Doctor John to the thriller Memorist and the time-bending Kairos, but it was the costume dramas that defined her.

The Red Sleeve, broadcast on MBC in 2021 opposite Lee Jun-ho as King Jeongjo, is the role most viewers now attach to her name. Deok-im is a palace maid who loves the king and still resists becoming his consort, and Lee played that refusal without letting it harden into stubbornness. The series brought her MBC’s top excellence award and a Baeksang nomination for best television actress. Two years later she won the same MBC prize again for The Story of Park’s Marriage Contract, a time-travel romance that drops a Joseon noblewoman into present-day Seoul. By then the Korean press had settled on a nickname for her, the historical drama queen, a compliment that also works as a fence.

That label is the part of her career worth arguing with. Her contemporary work has been steadier than it gets credit for, from the legal romance The Law Cafe with Lee Seung-gi to What Comes After Love, the Coupang Play series opposite the Japanese actor Kentaro Sakaguchi, adapted from the novel by Gong Ji-young and Tsuji Hitonari. Yet those series tend to be remembered as pleasant rather than necessary. Her screen persona rests on warmth and quick comic timing, and the risk with Rashta is that she brings too much of both. In the webtoon, Rashta was one of the characters readers most liked to dislike. Lee has asked audiences, in interviews around the launch, not to hate her. An adaptation that makes its usurper sympathetic could soften the story’s central conflict between two women into a misunderstanding, and whether Lee can play real menace, rather than charm with a motive, is what this new phase has to prove.

The groundwork was laid off screen. In September 2025 she left Prain TPC, the agency that had managed her for eleven years, and signed with Fantagio. Three months later, on December 30, she collected a best actor award at the MBC Drama Awards for Motel California, her romance with Na In-woo, in which she plays Ji Kang-hee.

This autumn she appeared in Still Shining, Song Il-gon’s film starring Kim Hye-ja, which had its world premiere at the Busan International Film Festival before opening in Korean cinemas on October 21; Lee plays Ji-an, the granddaughter who stays close to Kim’s character. Then came The Remarried Empress, adapted from Alphatart’s web novel and its Naver webtoon, with Shin Min-a as Empress Navier, Ju Ji-hoon as Emperor Sovieshu and Lee Jong-suk as Prince Heinrey. Its first four episodes arrived on November 3, and Disney has since called it the most viewed local original premiere in the history of Disney+ and Hulu, a record based on the company’s own count of the first three days.

Next is Long Vacation, a Netflix fantasy romance directed by Lee Jung-hyo, who made Crash Landing on You, and written by Jung Hyun-jung. Lee plays Lee Deul-pan, a fiercely self-reliant hotel employee, opposite Choo Young-woo as a demon who knows nothing about love; Netflix has not yet set a release date. Until then, the question her career is asking is a narrow one: whether the actress who made her name on women who turn down the crown can make viewers believe in one who would take it.