Kim Da-mi

1,500 candidates for one role

Kim Da-mi wasn't seeking fame when she auditioned for The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion in 2018. She competed against 1,500 actresses for the role of Ja-yoon. The producers were looking for an unfamiliar face who could carry a plot of violent action and psychological suspense.

She won the role, and her life changed in a single afternoon.

Before that, she had only a minor role in the film Marionette. Her education at Incheon National University gave her the technical tools, but it was her cool, piercing gaze that won over director Park Hoon-jung. The release grossed more than $24 million and earned her the Best Actress Breakthrough award at the Blue Dragon Film Awards.

Because her performance didn't rely on dialogue. The actress built the character through silence and a physicality that surprised the Korean industry.

The leap to global television

In 2020, she took on the challenge of playing Jo Yi-seo in Itaewon Class. The character was hard for traditional audiences to accept because she broke the mold of the sweet, self-sacrificing heroine. But her chemistry with Park Seo-joon and her two-tone hairstyle worked like a magnet for Netflix's international audience.

The series reached very high viewership ratings, and Kim Da-mi won the Baeksang Award for Best New Actress in television that same year. She did it without having worked on a television set before this project.

In 2021, she reunited with Choi Woo-shik in the romantic drama Our Beloved Summer. The tone was different from her previous work. Here, she played a marketing expert dealing with the past and maturity through a slow-paced narrative.

And the gamble paid off.

Arthouse films and big-budget productions

In 2023, she starred in Soulmate, an adaptation of the Chinese film of the same name. Critics praised her ability to convey the passage of time through subtle facial expressions without makeup prosthetics. The production cost around $7 million and focused on female friendship over two decades.

The project required months of prior rehearsals.

Kim Da-mi signed with United Artists Agency in 2022 to manage her career outside South Korea. In 2025, she took part in the production of the science fiction film The Great Flood, directed by Kim Byung-woo. In this Netflix film, she plays a researcher fighting to survive in a flooded building during a global catastrophe.

Filming for The Great Flood used cutting-edge technology to simulate real flooding on closed sets. In 2025, she also headlined the mystery series Nine Puzzles alongside Son Suk-ku. Yoon Jong-bin directed, and most of the budget went toward the technical recreation of complex crime scenes.

Post-production on her 2025 projects took more than eight months due to the volume of digital effects required for the water sequences.