The One Time Kim Min-joon Was Speechless Because of G-Dragon

Actor Kim Min-joon joined TV Chosun's Baekban Gigan on April 5, and once again found himself telling the story that follows him everywhere: the time he tried to give G-Dragon an allowance.

Kim Min-joon is married to Kwon Da-mi, the older sister of Kwon Ji-yong — the artist the world knows as G-Dragon, leader of BIGBANG and one of the most iconic figures in K-pop history. The marriage, formalized in October 2019, made the accomplished actor and former top model a member of one of Korean entertainment's most prominent family circles. It has given him an inexhaustible source of gently self-deprecating material ever since.

The Allowance That Stumped Him

In Korean family culture, giving an allowance or pocket money to a younger sibling is a small but meaningful gesture — a way of expressing affection and care. Kim Min-joon had always imagined doing exactly that for his wife's younger brother. Then he got to know the younger brother.

"I always had this dream of slipping some pocket money to my younger sibling," he explained on the show. "But GD is the one who made me wonder how much would even be appropriate." The admission is both self-aware humor and a genuinely logical observation. What amount of money functions as a meaningful gesture to someone operating at G-Dragon's level of success? The question does not have a satisfying answer.

The story has circulated in Korean entertainment media in various forms since Kim Min-joon first told a version of it on Knowing Bros in 2020. Each retelling adds a new detail or a slightly different emphasis, but the core remains the same: a man confronting, with honesty and good humor, the specific absurdity of his own situation. He is by no means unsuccessful. He is, by any ordinary measure, a highly accomplished person with decades of career recognition. And yet, in this particular family context, the usual measures of success feel suddenly inadequate.

G-Dragon has been notably generous within the family. He gifted Kim Min-joon and Kwon Da-mi's son Eden not one but two luxury electric toy cars. He also publicly shared photos of his nephew on social media before the family had made the child's face public — a surprise Kim Min-joon has mentioned in past interviews with the kind of affectionate exasperation that suggests a genuinely warm family dynamic rather than a strained one.

From the Runway to the Screen to the Dinner Table

Kim Min-joon's path to becoming a reliable presence in Korean variety television has been unusually circuitous. He first became widely recognized not as an actor but as a top model — for much of the 2000s and early 2010s, he was one of the most visible faces in Korean advertising, known for a combination of striking height and an ability to hold attention without appearing to try.

The transition to acting was gradual, and initially met with the skepticism that tends to accompany models making such moves. He overcame it steadily, building a reputation as a dependable dramatic presence — the kind of actor that directors cast when they need someone who can anchor a scene without drawing attention to the effort itself.

More recently, he added a credit that has extended his profile considerably. He appeared in Parasite: Resurrection, the continuation of Bong Joon-ho's Oscar-winning world, where he underwent a full-body special effects makeup process requiring approximately six hours of application each day. The process demanded patience on a scale that most actors rarely encounter — half a working day in a makeup chair before any actual performance could begin.

The variety show format creates space for exactly the kind of admission Kim Min-joon made on Baekban Gigan: something small, genuine, and funnier for its honesty. He did not perform embarrassment. He described a real situation that has no clean resolution and let the audience appreciate the comedy of it.

Why the Story Still Works

What distinguishes Kim Min-joon as a variety guest is the absence of defensiveness. He does not tell the G-Dragon story with resentment or with a need to establish his own achievements in contrast. He carries a bag that once belonged to G-Dragon — mentioned in other appearances — and describes it simply as his favorite item. The provenance is incidental. The warmth is genuine.

There is a version of the brother-in-law dynamic that could be told as a competition or a grievance. Kim Min-joon consistently tells it as a comedy with an affectionate resolution. The audience responds accordingly, every time he tells it.

G-Dragon's Return Adds a New Dimension

G-Dragon's renewed presence in Korean public life gives all of this a freshness it might not otherwise have. After a period of relative quiet that included significant personal and professional challenges, Kwon Ji-yong has been rebuilding his public profile in 2025 and 2026 — returning to music and performance, reestablishing himself as one of Korean culture's most distinctive creative voices.

His return means that the conversation around him has intensified again, extending naturally to the people close to him. Kim Min-joon finds himself, as he has before, at the intersection of his own career and the attention that proximity to G-Dragon inevitably generates. His response, as always, is to treat it lightly — to find the story in it, to make it something worth laughing about, and to leave no impression that any of it bothers him in the slightest.

It is, in its way, a skill as practiced as anything he has done on a runway or in front of a camera.

Baekban Gigan airs Sunday evenings on TV Chosun.