Song Kang, the ‘Son of Netflix’ who went back to his mother’s piano

Photo: K-POPIT 케이팝잇 / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 23, 1994 Suwon, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Escape, Beautiful Vampire
Awards	2 SBS Drama Awards · Asia Contents Awards · Seoul International Drama Awards

For most of his career, Song Kang has been discussed as a face. The Korean entertainment press calls him a “face genius”, and abroad he became the “Son of Netflix”, the actor whose dramas kept landing on the platform’s global charts. Yet the roles that moved him forward were the ones he trained his body for. He learned ballet from scratch for one series. For the part he chose to come back to after military service, he needed the piano, and he already half-knew it, because his mother had taught him as a boy. That role took him back to Korean prime time, where its audience nearly tripled between the first episode and the last.

The piano came first. Song grew up in Suwon, south of Seoul, the elder of two sons of a former artistic gymnast and a piano teacher; his grandfather had wrestled ssireum, the Korean folk sport. He took his first lessons at home and won prizes at children’s piano competitions. Acting arrived late and almost by accident. He had wanted to study architecture, gave it up, and drifted for about a year after high school, until a viewing of Titanic, and the look in Leonardo DiCaprio’s eyes, made him want to act. His mother asked him not to choose such a hard job. His father told him to try.

Born on April 23, 1994, he was accepted to the theatre and film programmes at both Hanyang and Konkuk universities and chose Konkuk, where he studied film. He went through five rounds of auditions to sign with Namoo Actors. Then, by his own account to the JoongAng Ilbo, he coasted for nearly a year as if the hard part were over, until the agency told him to quit if he meant to carry on that way.

His debut came in tvN’s The Liar and His Lover in 2017, followed by the MBC family drama Man in the Kitchen and eight months as a co-host of SBS’s music show Inkigayo in 2018. In When the Devil Calls Your Name, in 2019, he played Luka, a young musician who can handle any instrument, and relearned the piano his mother had taught him for the part. The same year, Netflix’s Love Alarm, adapted from a webtoon, gave him his first lead: he was chosen from roughly 900 hopefuls to play Hwang Sun-oh, the high-school boy who falls for the character played by Kim So-hyun.

Sweet Home made the reputation international. Directed by Lee Eung-bok and adapted from another webtoon, the horror series cast him as Cha Hyun-su, a suicidal teenager trapped in an apartment block as its residents turn into monsters. Variety reported that 22 million Netflix member households watched it in its first month. It brought him a Baeksang Arts Awards nomination for best new actor in television and the Character of the Year prize at the Seoul International Drama Awards in 2021. In tvN’s Navillera that year he played Lee Chae-rok, a young ballet dancer who ends up teaching a 70-year-old retiree, played by Park In-hwan; he had never danced before and trained for six months. JTBC followed with Nevertheless, opposite Han So-hee, and in 2022 with Forecasting Love and Weather, opposite Park Min-young.

My Demon, his first lead on a terrestrial network, cast him as Jeong Gu-won, a demon who loses his powers after his fate becomes tied to a chaebol heiress played by Kim You-jung. He lost about 10 kilograms because he felt a demon should look sharp. The SBS series earned him the Top Excellence Award for a miniseries romance or comedy at the 2023 SBS Drama Awards, along with the Best Couple prize shared with Kim. Before enlisting he also shot a cameo in the military thriller Escape as a classical pianist whose bond with Koo Kyo-hwan’s character carried what The Korea Herald called a subtle queer subtext.

The “Son of Netflix” label flattered him and also hid a gap. His success was counted on global streaming charts more than in Korean living rooms. My Demon ended its run at 3.5 percent in Nielsen Korea’s nationwide ratings while it sat second on Netflix’s global list of non-English series, and Navillera, which critics praised, never became a ratings hit. The later seasons of Sweet Home, released in December 2023 and July 2024, fared worse with critics: the South China Morning Post gave the finale season one star out of five, and the most common complaint about the second was that Cha Hyun-su had been pushed to the edge of his own story. Song has argued against the reading of his career that seems to bother him most. He told MBC Entertainment that he prepared harder precisely so that his looks would not be the only thing people noticed.

Song enlisted as an active-duty Army soldier on April 2, 2024, and was discharged on October 1, 2025. On TEO’s YouTube talk show Salon Drip he later described military life as fun and said he had served in the same unit as BTS member V, who was on the special duty team while he was a regular soldier. Reports that he would return as a pianist in a tvN drama had surfaced in June 2025, while he was still in uniform.

Four Hands, Two Sonatas, written by Shin Yi-won and directed by Park Hyun-seok, cast him as Kang Bi-o, a perfectionist piano prodigy at an elite arts high school whose rivalry with a gifted outsider, played by Lee Jun-young, runs from the age of 17 into their late twenties. He took piano lessons for months before filming and admitted that his hands were shaking at the first script reading. The series premiered on tvN on August 29, 2026, with Netflix streaming it outside South Korea, and ran for 12 episodes. It opened at 3.4 percent and closed on October 4 at 9.4 percent nationwide, its best figure and first in its time slot.

His next role sends him back to the actress who shared his first lead. MBC has cast him opposite Kim So-hyun in White Scandal, a working English title for an adaptation of a webtoon, as Dan Yi-hyuk, a top actor and the illegitimate grandson of a chaebol family who starts a fake relationship with a former child star now working as a manager. Kim Cheol-kyu directs from scripts by Kim Ga-eun, and MBC has yet to announce an air date. It is a webtoon romance built around a famous face, the formula that made him; the test is whether the actor who came back at the piano can make Dan Yi-hyuk about something else.