Kim Jung-hyun
Kim Jung-hyun is an actor, born 1990.
Two roles carried Kim Jung-hyun out of the Korean market, and they are almost comically unalike. In Crash Landing on You he is Goo Seung-joon, a con man on the run, playing the register the drama needs least and therefore most: light, evasive, working an angle in every scene while the leads handle the romance. In Mr. Queen he is King Cheol-jong, a monarch installed as a puppet, and the whole part is a double performance, the harmless idiot the court sees and the man holding still underneath it.
Born in Busan in 1990, he came up the standard route: an early role in Jealousy Incarnate, then leads in School 2017 and Time, then the broad ensemble sitcom Welcome to Waikiki, where he is very funny and where nothing about the performance predicts the king.
Both of the dramas that made his name rank among the highest-rated Korean cable series ever made, which is a heavy thing to follow. What came after has been steadier and smaller: the fantasy Kokdu: Season of Deity, the family drama Iron Family, and Siren's Kiss in 2026. He is at the point in a career where the interesting question is which of the two registers he goes back to.
Movies (2)
TV (11)
Where to start with Kim Jung-hyun
Mr. Queen first. It is the better show and the better performance: a body-swap historical comedy that keeps turning into a political thriller, and Kim's king is why the turn works, because he plays the harmless version and the dangerous version as one man rather than two.
Crash Landing on You is the famous one and worth it for the scale, though he is deliberately kept to the side of it. His Seung-joon is the most entertaining thing in a very earnest series.
For comedy, Welcome to Waikiki is broad, chaotic and much funnier than its premise suggests, and School 2017 is the teen drama where he first carried a series. Jealousy Incarnate is the early supporting work.
Of the recent things, Kokdu: Season of Deity is the most ambitious and the most uneven, Iron Family is the conventional one, and Siren's Kiss is where he is now.