31 Years to Win Best Actor. It Cost Ahn Jae-wook His Savings.

Ahn Jae-wook wanted to be honest about something: winning the biggest award of his career was wonderful. And it was also, financially speaking, a disaster. The veteran Korean actor, who took home the Daesang — the Grand Prize — at the 2025 KBS Drama Awards after 31 years in the industry, recently confessed that the celebrations that followed had quietly drained his bank account.

"People congratulate me and want to meet up, and I always end up paying for everyone," Ahn told hosts on KBS1's variety program If You're With Hwang Shin-hye. "I even had to break one of my savings accounts." Three months after the ceremony, he described himself as essentially "broke" — a confession that resonated with audiences both for its humor and its unexpectedly human honesty.

31 Years in the Making

Ahn Jae-wook, 54, has been one of Korean television's most familiar faces since his debut in 1994. But for all his decades of work — the dramas, the musicals, the sold-out concerts — the Daesang had always belonged to someone else. That changed on December 31, 2025, when Ahn and co-star Uhm Ji-won jointly claimed the top prize for their performances in the KBS weekend drama Please Take Care of Eagle Brothers (독수리 5형제를 부탁해!).

In his acceptance speech, Ahn was visibly moved. He referenced the late actor Lee Soon-jae, who had won the same award the previous year and passed away in 2025. "I felt so much watching the late teacher's acceptance speech last year — even after such a long career, he was humble and grateful," Ahn said, his voice breaking. "I realized how small I was, and how much I still had to fill. If the late teacher had been here to hand it to me, that would have been the most moving and glorious moment of my life."

The ceremony was already emotionally charged with tributes to Lee Soon-jae. Ahn's words made it more so. "I always felt this award wasn't meant for me," he added. "But now I see that this day has come for me too."

The Drama That Finally Did It

Please Take Care of Eagle Brothers ran on KBS 2TV's coveted weekend drama slot from February to August 2025, eventually being extended by four additional episodes due to its surging popularity. Ahn played Han Dong-seok, a chaebol heir drawn into a warmhearted family story centered on five brothers of a traditional makgeolli (Korean rice wine) brewery. The show peaked at a 21.9% viewership rating — a remarkable figure for a time slot that had slipped into single digits before the drama arrived.

Ahn sang the drama's original soundtrack himself, and his chemistry with co-star Uhm Ji-won — who also won her first Daesang that night — was widely credited as a key driver of the show's success. The two actors were even named Best Couple at the awards ceremony. After a long career spent playing leading men in heavy dramatic roles, Ahn's warm, grounded performance in Eagle Brothers seemed to unlock something new in how audiences connected with him.

The Original Hallyu Star

To understand why Ahn's Daesang carried such emotional weight, it helps to understand what he represented to an entire generation of Korean drama fans — particularly in Asia. His 1997 MBC drama Star in My Heart (별은 내 가슴에), opposite the late Choi Jin-sil, is widely recognized as one of the founding texts of the Korean Wave. Domestic ratings hit 49.3%. When the drama aired in China, it pulled an estimated 150 million viewers and became a cultural phenomenon — Ahn became one of the first Korean celebrities to achieve genuine superstardom on the mainland. His concert in China drew more than 50,000 fans. One Chinese university reportedly included a question about him on an exam.

The word "Hallyu" itself — the Korean Wave — is said to have gained traction in part because Chinese newspapers needed a term to describe the explosion of enthusiasm around Ahn Jae-wook following Star in My Heart. He went on to launch a music career, with his debut album selling over 700,000 copies. He was, in every sense of the phrase, a first-generation Hallyu star. And yet the Daesang had waited 31 years.

A Career That Refused to Stay Still

Ahn's path through those 31 years was not always smooth. In February 2013, he underwent emergency brain surgery in the United States to treat a subarachnoid hemorrhage. He returned to work more than a year later and has not slowed down since — expanding into Korean musical theater with acclaimed runs in productions including Jack the Ripper, Rudolf, and Dracula. He married musical actress Choi Hyun-joo in 2015, having met her during a production of Rudolf. The couple has two children.

In recent years, he has returned to television in projects like the 2021 thriller Mouse, demonstrating a willingness to take on darker, more complex material alongside the family dramas his audience loves. Eagle Brothers, though, was the project that brought everything together: the warmth, the longevity, the audience goodwill accumulated over three decades, and finally, the trophy.

The Price of Celebration

Which brings us back to the savings account. Ahn's variety show revelation — that winning the biggest prize of his career had left him repeatedly picking up tabs for celebratory dinners — is funny precisely because it captures something real about Korean social culture, and about what achievement actually costs in practice. When you win, everyone wants to celebrate with you. And in Korea's social economy, the winner often pays.

He made his confession while filming an episode of KBS1's If You're With Hwang Shin-hye, scheduled to air April 1, 2026. Ahn and host Hwang Shin-hye share a unique history — he once played her ex-husband in a drama — making their on-screen reunion all the more entertaining. The show, which follows Hwang Shin-hye as she navigates everyday Seoul life with celebrity guests, has become a warm, conversational space for candid moments of exactly this kind.

Ahn's admission doesn't come across as a complaint so much as a wry, self-aware observation from someone who has been in this industry long enough to find the ironies amusing. He waited 31 years for his Daesang. He will presumably rebuild his savings account a bit faster than that.