An Bo-hyun Did Valet Parking and Day Labor to Survive Before Fame: His Audition Schedule Made It the Only Option

Before he was a recognizable face on SBS, An Bo-hyun was hauling furniture between audition slots and pumping gas at a service station. In a video released August 2 on the YouTube channel Yojeongjaeheong under the title "Your Story Is Good Enough for a Drama," the actor sat down with co-star Jung Eun-chae and spoke with unusual candor about the years before anything broke his way.

The jobs he listed were valet parking, designated driving, and what he called iljikjik work: casual day labor with no fixed employer. The reason for that last category was practical. "If an audition came up, I couldn't show for a regular job," he said. Day labor let him leave on short notice. Moving crews were a particular staple, partly because the work paid in meals as well as wages. "They fed you and covered food costs, so I did a lot of that," he explained. A stint at a gas station rounded out the list. "There's nothing I haven't tried."

What's easy to forget, hearing that account, is how far his starting point was from the entertainment industry. An Bo-hyun trained as a boxer and, by his own account, had been planning to skip university and enlist as a career soldier. The entertainment world was not part of any plan.

His cousins changed that. Noticing his height, they suggested he look into modeling, a recommendation he greeted with genuine skepticism. "Modeling? Is that really something I can do?" At nineteen, he joined a program that let prospective models get a feel for the work. It was there that he met a peer one year his junior who would go on to become a well-known model named Woo-bin. "It started with 'maybe I'll give modeling a shot,' and it led me here," An Bo-hyun said.

The telling is low-key, which is part of what makes it land. The Korean entertainment industry rarely trains its actors through a single, clean pipeline: many of the country's most established performers came through years of part-time work and open auditions before landing steady roles, and An Bo-hyun's account fits that wider pattern more closely than it might seem.

Chaebols X Detective Season 2, in which An Bo-hyun and Jung Eun-chae both star, premieres on SBS on August 7 at 9:50 p.m. KST.