Lee Kwang-soo Hits #2 on X Trends After Admitting He's Addicted to Talking to Fans

Actor Lee Kwang-soo joined fan messaging platform Bubble and, by his own admission, immediately lost control. "I can't hold back," he wrote to subscribers, "I keep opening and closing the app", and the confession landed like a punchline that the entire internet could hear.

It started, as these things often do, with beginner nerves. On his first day on Bubble (a subscription-based direct messaging service where Korean celebrities send personalised messages to paying fans), Kwang-soo fumbled through the features in real time, asking fans to guide him. What won people over wasn't the learning curve, it was the replies. His particular brand of variety-show wit, honed over more than a decade on Running Man, translated perfectly to short text bursts.

Too funny to stay contained

The messages that circulated outside the platform told most of the story. When fans teased that he was showing signs of addiction, Kwang-soo leaned into it: "Part of me wants to look busy. Someone tie me down." When one fan told him to get some sleep late at night, he replied that he'd probably still be moving his thumb even after falling asleep, and when another said goodnight, he responded: "Wait. Please, just a little longer." The line about feeling like a Mafia game suspect when told to act naturally got shared widely enough to pull in people who had never considered subscribing.

Posts about his Bubble activity racked up more than 300,000 views across online communities, and the keyword "Lee Kwang-soo Bubble" climbed to second and third on X (formerly Twitter) Korea's real-time trending chart. Fans who hadn't subscribed yet started commenting that he was the first celebrity to make them genuinely consider it. "The subscription fee would be worth every won," was a common sentiment.

Online, a particular wave of nostalgia surfaced alongside the buzz: viewers who grew up watching Running Man in its prime were turning up in comment sections across different fandoms, prompting comparisons to a reunion of so-called "Running Man kids" scattered across the internet.

Fellow celebrities come calling

The buzz reached his peers quickly. Kim Woo-bin, one of Kwang-soo's closest friends in the industry, brought it up on his own fan platform: "Kwang-soo started Bubble?" he wrote. "Where can I see it? I want to chat with him too." He followed up with: "People are saying he's funny on Bubble? How is he going to be funny there too?"

IVE's Rei weighed in separately, saying she wanted to subscribe to Kwang-soo's Bubble and was "seriously thinking about it," adding that the thing she envied most about him was simply: "being that funny."

For an actor who built his public image through ensemble chaos on a long-running variety show, the solo format of Bubble might have seemed like a stretch. Instead it turns out the one-on-one dynamic suits him just as well, and now two of his colleagues are watching from the sideline, waiting for their turn to get in on the conversation.