Kwon Yul

The Man Who Had to Change His Name

Kwon Se-in disappeared in 2012. It was not a spiritual retreat or a resounding failure. He simply decided that his birth name lacked the strength needed to sustain a long career in Korean cinema.

That's how Kwon Yul was born. Under this new professional alias, he signed with the agency Saram Entertainment and began rebuilding a path that had started with doubts five years earlier.

His debut in 2007 with Mackerel Run was not the springboard he had dreamed of. The series flopped in the ratings, and his co-stars found stardom faster than he did.

And the gamble paid off.

The Explosion of the Seventeen Million

In 2014, he appeared in The Admiral: Roaring Currents, playing the son of General Yi Sun-sin. The film became the highest-grossing movie in South Korean history, selling 17.6 million tickets.

It was her first big break.

But the actor did not want to be typecast in period dramas. In 2015, he moved into romantic comedy with Let’s Eat 2. He played a perfect civil servant who hid a much more down-to-earth personality than his suit jacket suggested.

This role brought him a level of domestic popularity that had eluded him until then. Audiences connected with his ability to seem vulnerable and distant at the same time.

The Fracture of the Kind-Faced Image

In 2018, he decided it was time to scare audiences. He accepted the role of villain Bang Je-soo in the crime series Voice 2.

No one expected that level of violence.

His portrayal of a meticulous psychopath who kept human trophies in wooden boxes broke with his past as a leading man. He reprised the character in 2019 for the third installment of the franchise, maintaining the tension of an antagonist who is already part of cable television history.

During 2023, he kept his momentum going with the thriller Longing for You. In this production, he played an elite prosecutor caught in a web of family secrets, which required him to hold very long silences in front of the camera.

In 2024, he worked on two projects with very different tones. On one hand, he shot Connection, and on the other, he explored comedy in My Sweet Mobster.

During the filming of his action scenes in 2024, the crew noted that Kwon Yul prefers not to use stunt doubles for close-up shots so that the muscle tension looks real.