Lee Sang-min Left 'Blood Game X' After Negotiating Until 4:30 A.M.: Here's Why He Still Has Zero Regrets

Lee Sang-min stayed up until 4:30 a.m. negotiating with the production team of Wavve's Blood Game X, checking schedules back and forth, trying to find any workable arrangement. There was none. When episode 7 aired, viewers saw him step forward and say, "Can I say something?" before announcing he had to leave to take his wife to a hospital appointment the following day.

The broadcaster, best known as a former member of the idol group Rula and as a long-running TV personality, withdrew from the ten-episode survival series at that seventh installment. In an interview in Yeouido, Seoul on the 21st, he explained what actually happened behind the scenes. "The production had rented the venue for eight days," he said. "Everything was scheduled around that window. I didn't know there was no flexibility at all. I didn't know the location had a fixed rental period."

What made the exit sting more was the timing. After he left, the show moved into a mafia game-style format. "Those are exactly the games I love and am good at," he said. "I watched it later and just wanted to kick myself."

His appearance on Blood Game X marked his first survival show participation since tvN's The Genius: Grand Final in 2015. In the years between, he turned down every survival format that came his way and, by his own account, stopped watching the genre entirely. "I was scared I'd get eaten alive and embarrass myself," he said. The push to finally try again came partly from his wife, who is a fan of survival programming. "She told me: the fact that you haven't said no yet means you actually want to go. Go for it."

On Blood Game X, Lee competed on Team P1 alongside Blood Game Season 1 winner Lee Tae-gyun, former baseball player Jung Geun-woo, and MBC announcer Park Ji-min. The show's fourth season introduced a team-battle format, a shift from the individual survival structure of its first three runs. Lee, who served as MC during Season 1, came back this time as a player, and drew notice for his layered psychological gameplay, including deliberate misdirection.

Despite the abrupt exit, he is unambiguous about wanting to return. "When a person falls apart and rebuilds, the dominant thought becomes: I can't fall apart again. That's why I'd been staying home. This was me coming back out and showing I'm still here. If they call me again, there's no reason not to go."

The interview also turned to the period following his 2025 SBS Entertainment Awards grand prize win, which he received for his work on My Ugly Duckling and Barefoot Friends:돌싱포맨. It was his first individual grand prize at the ceremony, having previously shared a group award in 2021. The win, by his own reckoning, arrived at the wrong moment.

"Why did I have to receive it then?" he said with a long exhale. He explained that 2024 had been the year he felt he truly earned the recognition, but by the time the award actually came in 2025, his activity had dropped sharply. He had left both shows after getting married, and felt he had no real grounds to accept it. "I'm probably the person who got the most criticism for receiving a grand prize," he said.

The first several months of 2026 were spent processing that weight. "The three or four months after the award were especially hard. About two months went to everything I hadn't been able to say, and another four months went to figuring out how I was supposed to act going forward." He added that he now has a new appreciation for how hosts like Yoo Jae-suk and Shin Dong-yeop have handled the same award multiple times. "I genuinely don't know how they survive it."

One more thread ran through the conversation: what comes after "Gungsangmin," the persona he built around his long public struggle with debt. In 2024, he announced on My Ugly Duckling that he had fully cleared approximately 6.9 billion won in liabilities accumulated from a failed business venture. With the debt gone and the character attached to it retired, Lee acknowledged he is in unfamiliar territory. "Right now I'm in a transitional period, building a new character. If I show people the happiness of being married, they'll discover something new about me."

The final episode of Blood Game X is next. Whether Lee Sang-min gets a second run at the format remains to be seen, but on early indicators, the audience responded well enough to his seven-episode arc that a return invitation seems plausible. Circle the date he actually signs the contract.