Kim Soo-hyun

In 2007, Kim Soo-hyun was just a teenager with messy hair looking for a place in the sitcom Kimchi Cheese Smile. His mother had made him take acting classes to overcome a pathological shyness that kept him from making eye contact with strangers. That theater workshop at Chung-Ang University did more than cure his fear.

Gave him his profession.

His first major breakthrough came in 2011 with Dream High. For this role as a gifted musician, he had to train like an idol trainee at the JYP offices for three months. But the mass phenomenon really took off in 2012 with the historical drama Moon Embracing the Sun. The series hit viewership peaks of 42.2% in Korea and earned him the Best Actor award at the Baeksang Arts Awards.

The Move to Film and the Continental Phenomenon

In 2012, he decided to try his luck in action cinema with The Thieves. The film did so well that it sold 12.9 million tickets in Korean theaters. A year later, he starred in Secretly, Greatly, playing a North Korean spy infiltrated into a humble neighborhood. Audiences once again filled theaters to watch him act in an erratic and comedic way.

The real craze arrived in 2013 with My Love from the Star. His role as an alien stranded on Earth for 400 years captivated China and Southeast Asia. Sales of the products he endorsed soared, and his endorsement fees reached levels never before seen in the industry. But the pressure to maintain that status led him to choose more complex and riskier projects.

In 2017, he released the film Real before leaving for mandatory military service. It was a critical and commercial failure that raised doubts about his ability to choose scripts outside the mainstream commercial circuit. He spent 21 months in the Korean Demilitarized Zone fulfilling his civic duties and disappeared completely from public life.

Comeback and record-breaking salaries

In 2020, he returned to television with It’s Okay to Not Be Okay. The Netflix series explored mental health and childhood trauma with a very distinctive gothic aesthetic. For this role, Kim Soo-hyun earned 200 million won per episode (about 150,000 euros at the exchange rate of the time), becoming the highest-paid actor in Korean television.

And the gamble paid off.

In 2021, he starred in One Ordinary Day, an adaptation of the British series Criminal Justice. It was a production of just eight episodes that aired on the Coupang Play platform. In 2024, he returned to the romantic melodrama genre with Queen of Tears under the direction of screenwriter Park Ji-eun. The production reached a 24.9% audience share in its final episode.

Filming for Queen of Tears lasted nearly eleven months due to international locations in Germany. The production company Studio Dragon invested an estimated budget of 40,000 million won to cover technical costs and the salaries of the main cast.