Kim Hye-soo's New Series Just Broke Coupang Play's All-Time Viewership Record: Here's What She Says About the Role

Kim Hye-soo's new Coupang Play series has already claimed the platform's all-time viewership record, and in a sit-down interview at a café in Seoul's Jongno district, the actress was candid about both the role and the reception: "I expected it to be fun, but I did not expect it to be this warm. I'm genuinely grateful."

Affair Isn't the Problem (original title: 지금 불륜이 문제가 아닙니다) is an eight-episode black comedy about two neighboring couples whose lives collide in increasingly chaotic ways. Kim Hye-soo plays Gyeong-hee, a home-interior influencer with a million followers and what looks like a flawless marriage. Across the street live Soo-jeong, a polished dermatology clinic director played by Jo Yeo-jeong, and her husband Bo-seong, played by Kim Jae-cheol, who are deep in a messy divorce. Kim Ji-hoon plays Gyeong-hee's younger, conventionally handsome husband Jae-hong. The story picks up speed when both couples get pulled into something much larger than any of their domestic dramas.

Kim Hye-soo said the script caught her attention from the title alone. "The second I read it, I felt like it was daring me not to watch," she said. "I laughed out loud by myself reading it, which honestly hasn't happened in a while."

Her interpretation of Gyeong-hee goes well beyond the surface glamour. Rather than playing her as simply an aspirational lifestyle figure, Kim Hye-soo read the character as a breadwinner: someone who built everything she has through relentless self-promotion, starting from a leaky rooftop apartment and treating her own family as a kind of selling point on the way up. "The glam exterior is real, but what's underneath is a person who has run at full speed her whole life to protect her family and make something of herself," she explained. "Even when the husband's affair surfaces, or when everything starts falling apart, she refuses to crumble. There's a kind of self-command there: 'I have to hold this together, because I'm the one holding it together.'"

One of the more interesting creative decisions was how much of that tension she embedded in the wardrobe. For a scene where Gyeong-hee walks the short distance to her neighbor's home, she wears a high-end tweed outfit with an oversized pink ribbon at the neck, while her husband shows up in a tuxedo. "It's less than 100 meters away," Kim Hye-soo noted with a laugh. "The whole point of those clothes is to show that she wants to out-class the woman across the street, and also that she's a little afraid she never will." The costume team recreated the looks from scratch, modeled on real domestic and international influencers she studied during her prep work.

She was careful to keep her own personality out of Gyeong-hee's choices. "The more a role is defined by appearance, the more I try to pull back my own opinions," she said. "If you start thinking about your own strengths and weaknesses as an actor, you start drifting away from the character."

The series was written by the duo Jeong Eun-kyeong and Park Su-rin, who are reportedly said to have had Kim Hye-soo in mind for a decade while developing the project. She was quick to redirect any credit. "This is their first long-form series, and the way they engineer each turn, the structural confidence of it, left a real impression," she said. Director Lee Chang-hee's ability to make genre material feel accessible to a broad audience also came up as a specific strength.

For her co-stars, the praise was pointed rather than polite. She described Kim Ji-hoon as someone whose talent "hasn't had enough room to show itself" over the years, and said watching him in this role felt like seeing his range expand in real time beyond the clean-cut leading-man and villain categories he's been cast in before. On Jo Yeo-jeong, she was concise: "She more than carries her weight." Kim Jae-cheol, she said, has "enormous latent potential."

She also briefly addressed Signal 2, another project she completed that had its release delayed amid a separate controversy involving a co-star. "When a project goes out into the world is not something an actor controls," she said. "What stays with me is the experience of working with good people on something I believed in."

Four of the eight episodes are currently available on Coupang Play, with new installments dropping every Friday at 8 p.m. Kim Hye-soo's summary of the pacing was the most persuasive pitch she offered: "Episode two is better than episode one. Episode three is better than episode two. There might be people who haven't started yet, but there's nobody who stopped after the first one."