G-Dragon's Brother-in-Law Reveals 파묘 Set Secrets on TV — Including the Bathroom Problem

Kim Min-joon is known to Korean audiences for two very different reasons. The first is his performance as the terrifying, towering creature that gave 파묘 (Exhuma) its most viscerally frightening moments — a role that required six hours of full-body prosthetics every single day of filming. The second, less official reason is that he is married to Kwon Da-mi, the sister of G-Dragon, which makes him one of South Korea's most unexpectedly famous brothers-in-law.

On the April 5, 2026 episode of TV CHOSUN's 백반기행 (A Dining Table in Memory), Kim Min-joon traveled to Goseong, Gangwon Province with host Paik Jong-won, where he opened up about both dimensions of his life. The result was one of the more entertaining episodes the long-running food travel program has produced, mixing behind-the-scenes horror movie revelations with surprisingly relatable stories about what it means to be G-Dragon's family.

Six Hours in the Chair, and Still Couldn't Use the Bathroom Alone

The character Kim Min-joon played in 파묘 — known in the film as the 험한 것, an ominous supernatural entity rooted in colonial-era Japanese horror imagery — was one of the most technically complex creature performances in recent Korean film history. The transformation required Kim to spend up to six hours each filming day in the makeup chair, covered head to toe in prosthetics, before a single frame was shot.

On 백반기행, he described what that process felt like on the other side of the camera. The detail that drew the most reaction from viewers: the prosthetic fingernails used for the role were so elaborate and so long that Kim was unable to pull down his own pants in the bathroom without assistance from his manager. He recounted asking his manager for help with what is arguably the most unglamorous task anyone has to deal with on a film set, delivered the story with the kind of self-deprecating ease that comes from having had months to find the humor in it.

He also shared an episode involving an elderly woman he encountered while walking through a rural area in full prosthetic makeup — still in the creature transformation, during a break between setups. The woman, understandably, was severely startled. Kim recalled the moment with visible amusement, noting that the experience gave him a concrete sense of just how effective the makeup team's work really was.

The physical demands of the role extended beyond the makeup chair. Kim's character required an imposing physical scale that he alone could not provide. Former professional basketball player Kim Byeong-oh, standing at 220.8 centimeters — the second tallest Korean in recorded history — provided the creature's massive frame in certain shots, with Kim Min-joon's face and upper-body performance composited into the final result. The creature's distinctive voice was itself a production: a combination of Japanese voice actor Koyama Rikiya and Korean voice actor Choi Nag-yun, layered together to create an effect that was deliberately unsettling across language and cultural registers.

How He Got Cast in the First Place

The casting story for 파묘's Oni is, if anything, more unusual than the role itself. Director Jang Jae-hyun, according to accounts Kim has shared in interviews, discovered his lead creature performer not through a conventional audition process but by chance — reportedly encountering Kim Min-joon while jogging in his neighborhood and deciding almost immediately that he had found the face he was looking for.

The director had been searching for someone with a specific quality: a presence that recalled the Japanese actor Watanabe Ken, whose distinctive combination of intensity and physical authority has made him one of the most recognizable faces in East Asian cinema. When he met Kim by chance, he saw it. The casting followed. Kim has described the experience of being cast this way as surreal, noting that most of his preparation involved deliberately avoiding the film's early promotional events so that audiences would have no mental image of him before seeing the creature onscreen for the first time.

His co-stars on 파묘 have been generous in speaking about what Kim contributed to the film. Choi Min-sik, playing the film's lead shaman, observed that Kim's extreme makeup constraints prevented him from eating properly during filming — and noted a particular image that stuck with him: wanting to hand Kim a carton of banana milk or a cigarette, a very human gesture amid an inhuman transformation. Yoo Hae-jin, who plays the fengshui master at the center of the story, called Kim Min-joon the person who suffered most on set, citing the combination of barefoot performance across rough outdoor terrain and the full prosthetic suit worn in every scene.

The G-Dragon Side of the Story

The second strand of the 백반기행 episode touched on the more lighthearted dimension of Kim Min-joon's public identity: being the brother-in-law of Kwon Jiyong, known professionally as G-Dragon, one of the most famous entertainers South Korea has produced.

Kim and G-Dragon's sister Kwon Da-mi married in 2019 and had their first child, a son named Eden, in 2022. The dynamic between Kim and his famous brother-in-law has been a recurring source of gentle humor in interviews. On the program, Kim revealed that he had always had a small dream of giving his younger in-laws a bit of spending money — a very standard Korean family gesture — but found himself completely unable to do so with G-Dragon. "GD is my brother-in-law, so I just feel too intimidated to know what to give him," he admitted.

The episode also addressed a story that had circulated on social media: G-Dragon's gift to his nephew Eden. The gift in question was a set of luxury miniature electric cars — a child-sized Porsche and a child-sized Audi — which Kwon Da-mi had posted about online, prompting articles in Korean entertainment media about GD's characteristically extravagant approach to being an uncle. Kim spoke about the episode on the show, offering his perspective on the kind of generosity that apparently just comes naturally to someone at GD's level of success.

The contrast the episode drew between Kim Min-joon's two identities — horror film creature actor who needed a manager's help in the bathroom, and the slightly overwhelmed brother-in-law of a global superstar — made for television that felt genuinely warm rather than promotional. That balance is what 백반기행 has always done best: placing recognizable figures in ordinary settings and letting the conversation reveal something real.

백반기행 airs on TV CHOSUN on Sundays at 7:50 PM KST.