Upcoming K-Dramas of Kim Seon-ho

After three years since he starred in the 2021 superhit romantic comedy slice-of-life television series, Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha, Kim Seon-ho is back in the K-drama scene. The noted South Korean actor will feature in different interesting storylines with more interesting characters.

“Kim is an expert at expressing and displaying the different facets that make up his characters and encompassing the entirety of their experiences,” I wrote about him in my Actor You Need to Know feature. Beginning as a stage actor, he performed impressively in several plays preceding his on-screen debut in 2017’s Good Manager. Kim rose to fame with 100 Days My Prince (2018), Welcome to Waikiki 2 (2019), followed again by Start-Up (2020), and soared in global popularity with Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha.

Last year, The Childe (2023), a neo-noir action thriller directed by Park Hoon-jung, marked Kim’s cinematic debut. In the film, he had Nobleman (Gwigongja), a mystery pursuer who triggers chaos in the life of Kopino boxer Marco Han (Kang Tae-joo), who travels to South Korea to trace his estranged father. In tandem with the movie being praised for its violent, bloody alleyways, tense sequences, and unexpected twists, Kim’s robust performance stuck out as a provocative, dark, sarcastic killer—a far cry from the roles we are usually familiar with.

His upcoming K-dramas begin with the science fiction The Tyrant, directed by Park Hoon-jung, starring Cha Seung-won, Kim Seon-ho, and Kim Kang-woo. It’s a story of this US intelligence agency’s learning of a clandestine project—the Tyrant Project—the Korean government’s strategy to make a biological weapon to augment human skills. This leads America to call for its cancellation and retrieval of the samples. The weapon is to be turned over to them after the experiment is dismantled. However, a sudden attack throws things for a toss.

Shortly thereafter, a US intelligence operative goes about recovering the weapon himself, and a former agent assigned to kill the project participants steps in. Meanwhile, it’s Kim Seon-ho’s Director Choi, a secret Korean government employee overseeing The Tyrant Project, who ordered his team to secure the weapon.

The series is set to premiere globally on Disney+ in the second half of 2024.

Then there’s In the Net, a second series premised on Chan Ho Kei’s crime novel Second Sister, a directorial collaboration between Kim Jee-woon and Park Bo-ram. In a plot where Kim plays the elusive hacker N, Ai (Park Gyu-young) is having a hard time processing the loss of her younger sister, who resorts to death after being the target of severe online harassment. Eventually, Ai runs upon N and employs him to figure out more about everything that happened.

In the Net is reported to have wrapped up production and is expected to be released this year.

Next, Kim’s Can This Love Be Translated? (working title) co-starring with Go Youn-jung is probably the most anticipated drama of his. According to a Netflix release, the show could be the “next big global rom-com sensation.” In it, leading actress Cha Mu-hee (Go) hires Ju Ho-jin (Kim), a multilingual translator with exceptional language skills in Italian, Japanese, and English, as her interpreter. The conflicting opinions of the two individuals have disagreements thrown in between them. Even so, they warm up to each other through their time together, leading to moments of empathy and perhaps love.

Can This Love Be Translated? has been confirmed to stream on Netflix; the release date is yet to be announced.