Hyun Bin and Jung Woo-sung return in Made in Korea Season 2, set during the same 1979 coup that drove 12.12: The Night of Coup

Disney+'s Made in Korea returns on the 9th with a season set squarely inside one of the most turbulent windows in modern Korean history: the weeks between the October 26 assassination of President Park Chung-hee and the December 12 military coup. That placement is deliberate, and it puts the show in direct conversation with two films that covered the same ground from the inside.

At a press conference held on September 2 at Conrad Seoul in Yeouido, director Woo Min-ho, Hyun Bin, Jung Woo-sung, and the rest of the cast laid out how Season 2 distinguishes itself from 12.12: The Night of Coup (2023) and Woo's own The Man Standing Next (2020), both of which followed figures directly involved in those events.

A different vantage point on the same history

The premise of Season 2 is essentially a counterfactual. After the KCIA director assassinated the president, real historical power consolidated around the Defense Security Command. Woo Min-ho's question was simpler and more subversive: would the KCIA have just accepted that? "The starting point was imagining whether the KCIA would have simply stood there and taken it," he said. "We assumed there would have been a counter-move, and that Baek Ki-tae would be at the center of it."

Jung Woo-sung, who played a general opposing the coup in 12.12: The Night of Coup, drew the comparison clearly. "12.12 and The Man Standing Next dealt with the choices, anxieties, and conflicts of people who were directly inside those events," he said. "This show uses the historical events as a mechanism, and uses them to probe human nature." He added that the fictional framing gave him considerably more room as a performer: "As an actor expressing a character, Made in Korea was far more interesting and liberating."

Woo framed the distinction in structural terms. Where his earlier film and 12.12 were built from the perspective of the people most deeply implicated in what happened, Season 2 is narrated, in effect, by fictional characters on the periphery. "Even though it's the same event, the character and vantage point are different, so it will read differently," he said.

What changed between seasons

Season 1, which became the most-watched Korean Disney+ original globally in its release year and later won major prizes including a directing award at the 2026 Global OTT Awards and a best actor award at the 62nd Baeksang Arts Awards, introduced its world through largely self-contained episodic stories. Season 2 abandons that structure. "If Season 1 was individual episodes filling each slot, Season 2 runs as a single story from beginning to end," Woo said. His shorthand for the tonal shift: "Season 1 was a children's fight. Season 2 is adults."

The nine-year time jump places Baek Ki-tae (Hyun Bin) in a position he never quite held before. With the power vacuum left by the assassination, he rises to acting director of the KCIA, and the show's central conflict shifts from KCIA versus a lone prosecutor to KCIA versus the newly empowered Joint Investigation Headquarters, where Jang Geon-yeong (Jung Woo-sung) has returned as a special adviser after losing everything in Season 1.

Hyun Bin acknowledged the weight of following a successful first season. "There's no denying the pressure," he said. "But because so many people responded well to Season 1, I have hope that they'll come back for Season 2." He described Baek Ki-tae's arc in terms of appetite that outpaces achievement: even after climbing higher and accumulating more than he had, the character still wants more. That relentless drive puts him in conflict with virtually everyone around him, a dynamic Hyun Bin said left him feeling genuinely isolated during production. "There were so many scenes where I had to be in opposition to someone, wherever I turned. That made me lonely."

Udo Hwan, who plays Baek Ki-tae's younger brother Baek Ki-hyun, offered a counterpoint from his own experience on set: "Whether it snowed or rained, I was happy." Woo Min-ho pointed to the Baek family, the two brothers and their sister Baek So-yeong, played by Cha Hee, as one of Season 2's quieter focal points, describing a dynamic of love and resentment that he suggested would surprise viewers.

Jung Woo-sung framed his character's return as a psychological unraveling: Jang Geon-yeong believes he is pursuing justice, but the pursuit has quietly curdled into private revenge. "He hasn't recognized that what he's riding is personal vengeance, not justice," Jung said. "Watching where the tiger he's mounted takes him shows you both the shape of that era and a very human dilemma."

On the question of a third season, Woo Min-ho was measured. "I haven't thought about what comes after this," he said, before noting that viewers who watch Season 2 and then turn to 12.12: The Night of Coup will find the stories connect naturally. He seemed comfortable leaving it there.