Song Kang
Song Kang is an actor, born 1994.
Song was a model before he was an actor, and the early television work barely registers: a delivery man in Touch Your Heart, a young musician in The Liar and His Lover, a supporting turn in Man Who Sets The Table. Born in Suwon in 1994, he was a face looking for a format.
Netflix supplied it. Love Alarm in 2019 gave him Hwang Sun-oh, the sullen rich boy in a high-school romance built around an app that tells you who likes you, and the platform kept going: Sweet Home in 2020, Nevertheless in 2021, Forecasting Love and Weather in 2022, My Demon in 2023. The nickname that followed, Son of Netflix, is a joke about volume, but it is also an accurate description of how his career was assembled.
He is best used cold. Cha Hyun-su in Sweet Home is a withdrawn teenager trapped in an apartment block during a monster outbreak, and the performance works because Song plays the withdrawal as a settled fact rather than as tragedy waiting to be resolved. The romances ask him for warmth and get something more ambivalent; Park Jae-eon in Nevertheless is charming and evasive in equal measure, which is precisely what that story needs and precisely why it annoyed a lot of viewers.
Navillera in 2021 is the outlier and the best argument for him: a young ballet dancer opposite a seventy-year-old man determined to learn, with no charm available to hide behind. Escape in 2024 moved him into film.
Movies (2)
TV (12)
Where to start with Song Kang
Almost nobody starts at Navillera, and almost everybody should. It is a quiet, unglamorous show about two people who need the same thing at opposite ends of a life, and it asks Song for something none of the romances do.
After that, Sweet Home is the obvious big swing: creature horror in a collapsing tower block, uneven but genuinely ambitious, and his best-known role by a distance. Love Alarm is where the fame started and is the slightest thing here. Nevertheless, is worth it if you want a romance with a genuinely unlikeable centre; Forecasting Love and Weather if you want the opposite, adults being sensible at a weather agency. My Demon is the glossiest of the lot, and Escape is the film to see whether the screen career takes.