Ju Sang-wook Got Roasted at a Fish Market Over His 'Kim Bujang' Villain Role

Ju Sang-wook played a villain so convincingly in Kim Bujang that a fish market vendor felt compelled to tell him so, to his face, unprompted. The encounter was filmed and uploaded to the YouTube channel Cha Jangeum Cha Ye-ryeon, and it has been making the rounds for all the right reasons.

In the video, Ju visits Noryangjin Fish Market in Seoul when one of the stall owners spots him and immediately calls out: "Aren't you the chairman from 'Kim Bujang'?" Recognition secured, the vendor then pivots directly to his character, Joo Kang-chan, delivering what amounts to a one-person comment section out loud: "The best villain. A really bad person."

Ju's response is the detail that gives it away. Caught off guard, he reaches up and mimes putting on a mask, as if trying to disappear into anonymity mid-compliment. He then thanks the vendor anyway, which is probably the right call.

A second vendor weighed in with "you shouldn't be like that," and Ju fired back: "What did I do wrong?" The vendor's answer landed cleanly: "You did wrong by being so handsome." The market crowd apparently found this sufficient.

The vendors then gifted him fresh raw shrimp as a kind of spontaneous prize, and Ju, accepting it with a grin, remarked that he was glad he had not kept the mask on. It is a small, well-timed joke, and it works.

In Kim Bujang, which wrapped its Friday-Saturday broadcast run on the 25th of last month, Ju played Joo Kang-chan, a construction company chairman with a past as an enforcement thug. The role required him to carry multiple registers at once: the cold authority of a man used to being obeyed, a twisted version of paternal feeling, and something closer to obsessive instability beneath it all. By the time the series ended, the character had clearly left an impression well beyond the screen.