Thirteen Years After His Runway Debut, He Won Best New Actor

Part 5 of 6 in The Man Dior Saw First: Kim Young-kwang

Featured photo: Kim Young-kwang at a fan meeting in Shinagawa, Tokyo, October 2017. Photo: Kazoo3131 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped).

Park Bo-young and Kim Young-kwang, co-stars on Hot Young Bloods, shared a poster again in the summer of 2018. This time he was the lead, and that film made him Korea’s face of first love.

August 2018: Hwang Woo-yeon in On Your Wedding Day

On Your Wedding Day, released August 22, 2018, follows Hwang Woo-yeon, a man who can’t let go of the first love that began in the summer of his senior year of high school. It crossed 1 million admissions on its sixth day and took No. 1 at the box office (Hankook Ilbo, Aug. 28, 2018), finishing with 2.82 million (Top Star News, Oct. 23, 2026). Throughout its run, the height difference between Park Bo-young and the 190cm Kim was a talking point of its own (Wikitree, Oct. 22, 2026).

254,000 views as of Oct. 25, 2026.

91,000 views as of Oct. 25, 2026.

After the opening he said: “It feels like I got a whole year’s worth of compliments at once.” (Hankook Ilbo, Aug. 28, 2018) Behind that sentence were ten years of “getting yelled at on set for being bad at acting.” Knowing he’d heard far more scolding than praise in that decade, that “year’s worth of compliments” made me, as a fan, so happy it almost hurt.

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2018–2019: A best new actor, 13 years into the runway

The awards followed. At the 2018 Blue Dragon Film Awards, Korea’s Oscars, he won the Popular Star Award and was nominated for best new actor. The same year, the Elle Style Awards named him Man of the Year (Wikipedia). On May 1, 2019, at the 55th Baeksang Arts Awards, he won best new actor in film (Forbes, May 1, 2019). It had been 13 years since his first walk at Seoul Collection in 2006. He was 32.

35,000 views as of Oct. 25, 2026.

The same year he shot the fantasy comedy Wonderful Ghost with Ma Dong-seok (Don Lee of Marvel’s Eternals) and the tvN mystery Room No. 9 with Kim Hee-sun.

2018: The ace of Antarctica

In the spring of 2018 he went to Antarctica for Law of the Jungle. Working as Kim Byung-man’s right-hand man in brutal cold, he earned SBS’s nickname “the Antarctic ace.” Later, on a talk show, he summed the show up this way: “Law of the Jungle was actually easy. Nobody makes you talk. You just use your body.” (My Daily, Oct. 15, 2025, MBC Radio Star)

53,000 views as of Oct. 25, 2026.

2019: The executive who can’t recognize faces

In SBS’s 2019 The Secret Life of My Secretary, he played Do Min-ik, an executive hiding prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces. His co-star was Jin Ki-joo. The Episode 11 ending, where he pulls her into a hug, has passed 280,000 plays on SBS’s official channel, and he was nominated for top excellence in a miniseries at that year’s SBS Drama Awards (Wikipedia).

284,000 views as of Oct. 25, 2026.

2020: The doting uncle

In 2020, MBC’s I Live Alone opened the door to the man from the pictorials. He did Pilates, cooked Korean beef sous vide, and tried hard to win over his sister’s kids (Newsinside). The MBC clip of him playing with his niece and nephew, paired with EXO’s Kai doing the same, has passed 1.17 million views. Watching the man from the pictorials fumble around his niece and nephew was so cute that, honestly, I replayed it more than once.

1.17 million views as of Oct. 25, 2026.

506,000 views as of Oct. 25, 2026.

2021: His first action film

In February 2021 he released two projects at once. In KBS’s Hello Me! he played Han Yu-hyun opposite Choi Kang-hee. In the film Mission Possible he was Woo Soo-han, the owner of a shabby detective agency, with Lee Sun-bin. It was his first action movie, and he said, “I hope we get a sequel.” (Asia Today, Feb. 23, 2021)

In November 2022, Netflix handed him a serial killer.

Where to watch (checked Oct. 25, 2026, via JustWatch) – On Your Wedding Day (2018): US — Prime Video, Tubi (free), Rakuten Viki · Korea — Netflix, TVING, wavve – Room No. 9 (2018): US — Tubi (free) · Korea — TVING – The Secret Life of My Secretary (2019): US & Korea — Netflix · US — Rakuten Viki – Hello Me! (2021): US & Korea — Netflix – Mission Possible (2021): US — Prime Video · Korea — Netflix, TVING

Sources

• Hankook Ilbo, Aug. 28, 2018; Top Star News, Oct. 23, 2026; Wikitree, Oct. 22, 2026
• Forbes, May 1, 2019: 55th Baeksang winners
• Wikipedia, “Kim Young-kwang (actor)”
• My Daily, Oct. 15, 2025, Radio Star
• Newsinside, I Live Alone
• Asia Today, Feb. 23, 2021