The Korean wave known as Hallyu has spread far and wide across the whole world. In the late 1990s and early 2000s in the first stages of Hallyu it was primarily countries in East Asia; chiefly China and Japan but also other territories including Taiwan. It then spread further across Asia, and then later in the 2010s it reached Europe, North America and elsewhere owing to the appeal of not just dramas but also music through IDOL groups led by BTS and Blackpink.

In the 1990s and 2000s, it was dramas including What About Love (1997), Star in My Heart (1998), Winter Sonata (2002) and Dae Jang Geum (2003) that fueled the Korean wave, while the film My Sassy Girl (2001) was the film industry’s first pan-Asian hit being successful in territories including Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

There were signs that the popularity of Korean content was penetrating the West, but it was different content in the form of titles such as Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003), Bong Joon Ho’s Memories of Murder (2003) and Kim Jee-woon’s A Tale of Two Sisters (2003). The Host (2006) also struck a chord, as did Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan (2016) that came ten years after Bong’s blockbuster and was one of the most significant titles of the decade ushering in the subgenre of K-zombie content and broadly more dystopian fare that has become so dominant on streaming platforms.

Indeed, in the late 2010s and early 2020s, Hallyu hit a new peak with titles Parasite (2019) and Squid Game (2021) taking Korean content into unprecedented territory underscoring how Korea’s cultural sector was one of the leading creative industries in the world.

With the growth of Hallyu, many actors have become stars, not only in Korea but in other countries too. This was initially performers such as Bae Yong-joon, Lee Byung-Hun and Lee Young-ae with later and younger generations also experiencing global fandom further aided by the global reach of streaming platforms.

This week, we will explore the rise of this younger generation of Hallyu stars beginning with Byeon Woo-seok and Kim Hye-yoon, stars of the hit series Lovely Runner (2024). It will then turn to Kim Soo-hyun and Kim Ji-won, leads of Queen of Tears (2024) before profiling Go Min-si and Kim Tae-ri – both high profile Hallyu stars.  We will track their rise through some of the films they have starred in.

Byeon Woo-seok - 20^th Century Girl, Soulmate

In 2024 owing to the immense popularity of the drama Lovely Runner that was resonating both locally and internationally, Byeon Woo-seok saw his profile skyrocket– to a point, he is now one of the most sought-after actors of his generation.  

The actor, though, had been making inroads into the local film and wider content industry for several years before Lovely Runner. He played a small role in the drama Dear My Friends (2016) and landed his first leading role in the series Record of Youth (2020) costarring alongside Park Bo-gum and Park So-dam.

In 2022, Byeon earned Best New Actor nominations from the Baeksang Arts Awards and Buil Film Awards for his leading role in Bang Woo-ri’s coming-of-age melodrama 20^th Century Girl (2022). Premiering at the Busan International Film Festival in 2022, the film centers on a group of high school friends in 1999. Kim Yoo-jung plays a 17-year-old student, Bora, who gets close to Woon-ho (Byeon) to learn more about his friend, Hyun-jin (Park Jung-woo). Bora’s friend Yeon-du (Roh Yoon-seo) has asked her to find out as much about Hyun-jin while she is in the U.S. having heart surgery because she has fallen in love with him.

It's a title that falls into the category of nostalgia melodramas that have proved popular with both the younger and older generations – other examples include Architecture 101 (2012) and the Reply Series (2012-2016), or Lovely Runner that also takes audiences back in time to an earlier era.

Soulmate, also a well-crafted coming-of-age feature, is based on the 2016 Chinese film of the same name by Derek Tsang featuring Kim Da-mi and Jeon So-nee as two women born in 1988. Largely set in Jeju, the film tracks their relationship as they grow further apart with cracks appearing when Ha-eun (Jeon) starts dating her classmate Jin-woo (Byeon Woo-seok).

The film was re-released in cinemas in May 2024 after fans made requests for it to be shown in cinemas again after the success of Lovely Runner.

Kim Hye-yoon – Ditto (2022), The Girl on the Bulldozer (2022)

Akin to Byeon Woo-seok, Kim Hye-yoon also saw her popularity soar following Lovely Runner and was also increasing her profile in both film and television prior to the drama. She featured in the OCN crime series Bad Guys (2014) that like other content on cable TV laid the groundwork for some of the developments that came with Netflix and more genre-driven series that came later. It was her role in the JTBC hit series SKY Castle (2018-2019) that further increased her status as a rising star, and she secured roles as the protagonist in the MBC series Extraordinary You (2019) and the thriller Midnight (2021).

In 2022, Kim starred in the melodrama Ditto (2022) and the independent film The Girl on the Bulldozer (2022) – both very different films and roles.

In Seo Eun-young’s Ditto, which is a remake of the 2000 film of the same name, two students enrolled at the same school are able to communicate to each other via a radio. The male lead, Yong, (played by Yeo Jin-goo) is a mechanical engineering major in 1999 and the female protagonist is a sociology undergraduate, Mo-nee (Cho Yi-hyun) in the present day of 2021. They both get their hands on an amateur radio and start communicating, discussing life, friendship and relationships. Kim plays Yong’s first love in the late 1990s in what is a spin on the original – that film was set in what was then the present 2000.

In The Girl on the Bulldozer (2022) directed by Park Ri-woong, Kim plays a tenacious and charismatic young woman who is faced with a whole series of problems: from her father’s gambling and debt to her own temperament issues. Meanwhile she is trying to look after her younger brother that becomes even more challenging when her father gets involved in a car accident. But she is determined to investigate and ends up on a bulldozer and she’s furious.

In what was a film that stood out at the Busan International Film Festival in 2021 attracting notice for Kim’s powerful leading performance illustrating her range, it then screened at festivals in Asia, Europe and North America including the New York Asian Film Festival.  Kim also won several Best New Actress accolades including the coveted Blue Dragon Awards.

Kim Soo-hyun – The Thieves, Secretly Greatly

After starring in the high school musical series Dream High (2011) and the hit MBC period drama The Moon Embracing the Sun (2012), Kim Soo-hyun has been a hallyu star that has consistently remained a draw for local and international audiences. Take for instance, the series My Love from the Star (2013-2014) that further demonstrated the appetite global viewers had for Korean content, especially in Asia with it being particularly popular in China becoming one of the most-viewed shows on the Chinese streaming platform iQIYI.

This year, Queen of Tears reaffirmed Kim’s status as a star with enduring appeal having become TvN’s highest rated series at 24.850 percent. Netflix recorded over 680 million hours in viewing in the first half of 2024 making it one of the most viewed Korean dramas of the year.

While Kim hasn’t been as active in film of late, he has starred in several features. He featured as part of the ensemble cast in Choi Dong-hoon’s The Thieves (2012) that sold close to 13 million tickets in the summer of 2012. Kim plays the character of Zampano who is part of a team of professional thieves who work together to steal a 20 million diamond in Macau. Also starring Kim Yoon-seok, Lee Jung-jae, Jun Ji-hyun and Kim Hye-soo, like many of Choi’s features, with no shortages of set-pieces, it’s enthralling from beginning to end.

Kim also starred in Jang Cheol-soo’s Secretly Greatly (2013) playing a North Korea spy living in the South as a village idiot. He is joined by two other agents (Park Ki-woong and Lee hyun-woo) but they are ordered to take their own lives when the South demands that they turn in their spies in return to financial aid. In what was illustrative of Kim’s box office appeal and his growing fandom, the film sold a record breaking 919,000 tickets on its second day of release.

It also highlighted, in what was an earlier sign, how important webtoons would become in the wider content industry. Secretly, Greatly was based on the 2010 webtoon series Covertness.

Kim Ji-won – Romantic Heaven, Detective K: Secret of the Living Dead

After being scouted on the street in Seoul and then signed with an entertainment agency, Kim Ji-won has steadily become a major Hallyu star. She took on her first leading part in a film back in 2011 with Jang Jin’s melodrama Romantic Heaven (2011). Produced by Kang Woo-suk, and also written by Jin – one of the most talented writers in the industry – it tells the different stories of characters crossing paths at a hospital. Kim features as a woman searching for a bone marrow transplant for her mother who is suffering from cancer. It also stars Kim Soo-ro as a lawyer mourning the death of his wife and Kim Dong-wook as a taxi driver whose grandfather has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

Kim then starred in two segments of the Horror Stories (2012) and Horror Stories 2 (2013) omnibuses before returning to the silver screen in 2018 with Detective K: Secret of the Living Dead – the third installment of the Detective K series directed by Kim Sok-yun. Her character is a vampire who teams up with Detective K (Kim Myung-min) and his side-kick (Oh Dal-su) to solve a series of murders in what is familiar territory for the series but enjoyable nevertheless.

It is dramas, however, where Kim has taken her profile to new heights with the success of shows including Descendants of the Sun (2016), My Liberation Notes (2022) and Queen of Tears (2024).

Go Min-si – Smugglers

Another high-profile figure that continues to impress is Go Min-si. She made her debut as both a director and actor with the 2016 short film Parallel Novel (2016) that won the Grand Prize at the SNS 3 Minute Film Festival.

But it was acting that she ultimately pursued featuring in a web series including 72 Seconds (2016) before landing roles in Sweet Home (2020-2024) in which she starred alongside Lee Do-hyun, a pairing that would continue in Youth of May (2021) and Reincarnation Love (2022). Go recently starred as the lead in the Netflix series The Frog (2024).

She has also made an impact on the big screen. She played small roles in titles including Cheese in the Trap (2018), The Battle: Roar to Victory (2019) and she took on a supporting part in The Witch: Part 1- The Subversion (2018). But it was in Ryoo Seung-wan’s Smugglers (2023) where she would make her mark winning Best New Actress at the Blue Dragon Awards.

The film set in the 1970s, which sees a team of female divers (known as haenyeo) plan a heist is a blend of genres with Go standing out as the owner of a coffee shop who helps the divers. Her energy and charisma bring further vibrancy to what is a very enjoyable, colorful, and riveting film.

Kim Tae-ri – The Handmaiden, 1987: When the Day Comes

Now one of the leading stars of Korean cinema, Kim Tae-ri rose to fame following her acclaimed role in Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden (2016) that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. She was chosen from 1,500 actresses who auditioned for the part. A reworking of Sarah Waters’ British novel Fingersmith, the setting was changed from Victorian England to the Japanese colonial period where a pickpocket (Kim Tae-ri) is hired by a conman (Ha Jung-woo) to be a maid so he can seduce the Japanese Heiress called Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee).

Layered with meaning in typical Park Chan-wook fashion along with its stunning production values, the film became the first Korean film to win a BAFTA (British Film Academy Awards) for Best Film Not in the English Language.

From there, Kim featured in several highly anticipated films including Jang Jung-hwan’s 1987: When the Day Comes, which was Kim’s second feature film. Centering on the events of the June Democracy Movement in 1987, it follows various characters including a prosecutor (Ha Jung-woo), prison guard (Yoo Hae-jin), journalist (Lee Hee-joon) as the government attempts to cover up the death of activist Park Jong-chul. Kim plays a college student who is asked by her uncle, the prison officer, to send messages to a contact of his and she is later caught up in the demonstrations as she witnesses what is going on.  

Released a few months after former President Park Geun-hye was impeached, it was one of several films that year including A Taxi Driver (2017) that tackled the turbulent 1980s.

Kim’s career would continue to blossom on both the small and big screen starring in Little Forest (2018), Mr. Sunshine (2018), Twenty-Five Twenty-One (2022), Revenant (2023) and Jeongnyeon: The Star is Born (2024)

Written by Jason Bechervaise

Editted by Shim Eunha