Ju Sang-wook on Playing 'Chief Inspector Kim's Villain: 'I'd Rather Not Come Back for Season 2'

Ju Sang-wook has spent the better part of two decades playing the polished second-in-command type: the sleek executive, the composed department head, the man in the well-cut suit who keeps everyone else in line. That version of him is familiar to Korean drama audiences, and for a long time it was almost the only one available. 'Chief Inspector Kim' changed that.

The SBS Friday-Saturday drama ended its run with a peak nationwide rating of 23.1%, making it the highest-rated miniseries to air in 2026. Ju's character, Ju Gang-chan, a former hired thug who clawed his way to the chairman's seat of a corrupt construction conglomerate, was the kind of villain the show needed: charming on the surface, methodical underneath, and capable of cruelty that reads as entirely natural. For Ju, who had never been offered a proper antagonist role before, the response landed differently than he expected. "This is the first time in a long time that a project has done this well," he said. "I hoped we'd hold double-digit ratings, but I never imagined numbers that would go down in broadcast history. The first month was genuinely one of the happiest stretches I've had."

The path to Ju Gang-chan ran through director Lee Seung-young, with whom Ju had worked years earlier on the OCN crime series Special Affairs Team TEN, where Ju played a tenacious detective named Yeo Ji-hoon. Lee, reuniting with him after that collaboration, told Ju he thought of Gang-chan as the very kind of monster Yeo Ji-hoon once hunted. "The director always said he knows me better than anyone as an actor," Ju recalled. "Hearing that connection made the whole thing feel fated somehow." Several actors around Ju's age had reportedly wanted the role; the fact that Lee chose him anyway registered clearly.

The character's first appearance was set in a sauna, a scene that Ju recognized immediately as the moment that would establish everything. He spent three months in intensive physical preparation before filming began, building a frame that, paired with the burn scars the costume and makeup team added across his body, communicated Ju Gang-chan's history without a word of dialogue. "I thought: the body and those scars alone should tell the audience this person is not ordinary," he said. "If I'd had one more month, it would have been ideal, but within the time I had, I pushed harder than I ever have."

The performance itself rested less on grand physicality than on calibrated wrongness: laughing alone in a room where everyone else is afraid, describing atrocities with the flat affect of someone reading a grocery list. Ju said he kept returning to the question of what specific behavior would make Gang-chan read as a genuine sociopath rather than a conventional drama villain. He avoided improvisation in favor of precision with individual lines and micro-expressions, aiming to build a cumulative dread so that by the later episodes, simply standing still carried weight.

The scene most viewers responded to was in episode seven, when Gang-chan is beaten badly by Kim Bu-jang, the character played by So Ji-sub. Ju found unexpected pleasure in filming it. "I didn't think that many people would enjoy watching me get that thoroughly beaten," he said, laughing. "But I genuinely liked the humiliated expressions that came out in the moment. I'd never made those faces before." So Ji-sub, he added, checked on his physical condition throughout the all-day action shoot, pacing the scene around Ju's stamina.

Gang-chan's ending is definitive by design. The character loses nearly everything: the company collapses when its corruption is exposed, he and his father face criminal reckoning, and he is attacked by a character called Gold Tooth (played by Jo Bok-rae) before any of that is resolved. A clean return for Season 2 would require undoing the logic the show spent sixteen episodes building. Ju acknowledged that a second season is likely given the drama's reception, but placed himself carefully outside it. "Gang-chan has lost almost all the power he had. If he comes back doing evil again, the audience will be tired of it. I think it's right for him to end here," he said, adding that a brief cameo was the most he could imagine: he and the director had joked about Gang-chan appearing as a reformed man watching events from a distance. The director countered by suggesting a twin brother who arrives seeking revenge. Ju shut that down immediately.

One thing he admitted to envying was the dynamic among the drama's three middle-aged male leads, So Ji-sub, Yoon Kyung-ho, and Choi Dae-hoon, who shared most of their screen time together and whose chemistry became one of the show's signature pleasures. "Those three were always together. I was alone," he said. "They were working with the script but it was essentially all improvisation, the kind that comes from actually researching what would be funny and then testing it together. I had plenty of ideas too, but I was filming by myself. Even during promotions, I wanted to go out and talk about the show, but having the villain suddenly show up in that context would have been strange."

'Chief Inspector Kim' is streaming on Netflix internationally, and Ju said the shift in his social media comments has been noticeable: foreign-language replies have multiplied significantly, his follower count has grown, and his wife, actress Cha Ye-ryun, has seen a sharp rise in views on her YouTube channel, where Ju occasionally appears. He described those appearances as a straightforward window into daily life, something audiences seem to appreciate after spending weeks watching him play a man like Gang-chan.

Ju began his career in 1998 with a KBS drama, and is approaching his thirtieth year in the industry. He spoke about that milestone with less ceremony than you might expect. "The set never gets old for me. There are fewer and fewer people older than me on set these days, which means I'm often the senior presence, and that comes with its own sense of responsibility. But I go to set and I get energy from the people around me. That keeps things alive." He has worked almost continuously since Giant in 2010, and said he expects to keep doing so.

His self-assessment at the end of the interview had a dry clarity to it: "From department head specialist to chairman, and I still can't seem to leave the corporate world." What matters next, he said, is not the title the character holds but who that character actually is. Ju Gang-chan, thoroughly unpleasant and apparently beloved for it, seemed like fair proof of the point.