Kim Hyang-gi Opens Up After 20 Years in Korean Drama

At 27 years old, Kim Hyang-gi has already spent more than two decades in front of a camera. She debuted as a 4-year-old magazine cover model, transitioned to film acting at the age of seven, and has since built one of Korean entertainment's most quietly impressive résumés — spanning child roles, critically acclaimed drama performances, and now her first venture into comedy. As she sat down with reporters in Seoul this week to promote her new Coupang Play series The Absolute Value of Romance, she reflected on what nearly twenty years of consistent work actually feels like from the inside.

"I don't really feel it," she said simply, when asked if the 20-year milestone had sunk in. "When I'm deep in a character, suddenly a year has passed. I'm not acting while feeling the weight of it."

A Career That Grew Up in Public

Kim Hyang-gi's trajectory is unlike almost anyone else working in Korean entertainment today. Her first film credit came in 2006 with the children's movie Maumi, and what followed was a steady, carefully chosen progression through projects that consistently demanded more from her than her age might have suggested. She appeared in Ghost in the Black, A Werewolf Boy, and An Elegant Lie before landing one of her most praised performances in Innocent Witness, where she played a young woman with autism opposite Jung Woo-sung.

Her work in the blockbuster Along With the Gods franchise and the historical drama Hansan: Rising Dragon further demonstrated a range that has allowed her to move between genres and scales without losing what makes her performances distinctly her own. Through all of it, she has maintained a relationship with the craft itself that is, by her own account, closer to friendship than obligation.

"Acting is my lifelong friend," she said during the interview. "I'm drawn to the concept of friendship — that feeling of building something over time, with mutual respect and a certain understanding of each other's limits. Acting feels that way to me."

First Comedy Role at 27: Why She Said Yes

The Absolute Value of Romance (로맨스의 절댓값) is a high-teen comedy series streaming exclusively on Coupang Play. Directed by Lee Tae-gon and written by Lee Min-joo, the show centers on a high school student named Yeo Ui-ju who leads a carefully compartmentalized double life: by day, an ordinary student; by night, a romance novelist writing BL fiction under the pen name "Lee Muk." When her math teacher Woo-su, played by Cha Hak-yeon, discovers her secret, the tidy separation between her two worlds begins to collapse in spectacularly comic fashion.

For Kim Hyang-gi, the role represented genuinely new territory. She had never done comedy before — not in any sustained, genre-defining way — and Yeo Ui-ju required a lightness and a willingness to look ridiculous that her previous dramatic roles had not asked of her.

"I had to start from zero," she acknowledged. "I had to accept something completely new and take a risk with it. But looking back, I think the timing was right. This will be a role I remember for a long time."

The cast also includes Kim Jae-hyun, Son Jeong-hyuk, and Kim Dong-gyu as the handsome teachers at the center of Yeo Ui-ju's fictional novels — and her increasingly complicated real life. The series airs every Friday at 8 p.m. on Coupang Play.

The In-Between Years: Being 27 in Korean Entertainment

Kim Hyang-gi was characteristically candid when asked about where she finds herself now — not just in terms of her career, but in terms of how she sees herself.

"Right now I'm at an ambiguous stage," she said. "I'm not quite a full adult, but with a career this long, I'm certainly not a child either. I need to adapt well."

That sense of being between categories is something she appears to have thought about carefully. The Korean entertainment industry has a particular way of categorizing actors by the type of roles they can play, and the transition from young performers to fully established adult leads is rarely smooth. Kim Hyang-gi's deliberate approach to project selection has so far served her well — but she is clearly aware that the next phase requires a different kind of navigation.

What has changed most concretely, she said, is the internal experience of stepping onto set. "In the beginning, every project had an adjustment period. That period has gotten shorter. I've developed more capacity to control my own nervous energy. I can find my footing faster now."

Walking as Recovery, Not Rest

Outside of work, Kim Hyang-gi spoke about the habit she has developed to stay connected to herself between projects and during the long stretches of preparation that major roles require. She walks — not as a form of rest, but as what she calls "recovery."

"Walking isn't downtime for me," she explained. "It's how I come back to myself. When I'm stuck on a script, going for a walk often shakes something loose. A good idea comes. Something clicks."

The distinction — recovery versus rest — is a small one, but it reveals something about how seriously she takes the internal work of acting. She also spoke about the importance of clearing a character out of herself once a project ends, noting that holding onto a role too long can interfere with ordinary life in ways that are easy to underestimate.

She also reflected on a notable shift in her on-set experience while filming The Absolute Value of Romance: for the first time in her career, she was not the youngest person on set. "Until now I was always the youngest. This time I had younger co-stars and I found myself genuinely listening to what was on their minds. They had questions and concerns I hadn't thought about in years. It was a new kind of learning."

An Evolving Media Landscape and Where She Fits In

One area where Kim Hyang-gi expressed thoughtful awareness was the shifting shape of Korean entertainment consumption. The era of audiences sitting down in front of a television at a fixed hour to watch a drama is giving way to something more fragmented, more platform-driven, and more competitive for attention.

"Media is moving so fast right now," she said. "You can't just sit in front of a screen anymore and wait for things to come to you. I'm thinking carefully about how to adapt to that. It's something I take seriously."

Her decision to work with Coupang Play on The Absolute Value of Romance — a streaming platform that has been steadily building its original content slate — fits neatly into that awareness. The high-teen format, the comedy genre, and the streaming-first release model all represent areas where she has relatively less established ground, which appears to be precisely why she was drawn to the project.

After two decades in an industry that tends to define its performers by what they've already proven they can do, Kim Hyang-gi appears to be most interested in the parts of the job she hasn't fully figured out yet. Whether she's playing a grieving daughter, a historical warrior's ally, or a secret BL novelist who can't quite keep her two lives separate, that quality — of genuine, unhurried curiosity — is what makes her worth watching.

The Absolute Value of Romance streams every Friday at 8 p.m. exclusively on Coupang Play.