Woo Do-hwan on Bloodhounds 2: 'No Stunt Double, Every Hit Was Real, I Felt Alive'

Woo Do-hwan didn't use a stunt double for a single scene in Bloodhounds Season 2, and his body paid the price. In a sit-down interview in Seoul's Samcheong-dong neighborhood on April 9, the actor opened up about the physical toll and unexpected joy of performing every punch, fall, and rooftop sprint himself.

"Before filming Bloodhounds 2, I thought Tom Cruise was truly incredible for refusing stunt doubles," Woo said. "Now I understand. When you do the action yourself, you feel alive. If there's a Season 3, I told them I'd hang off a plane just like he does." He laughed as he said it, but the sentiment was genuine.

In the Netflix series, Woo reprises his role as Kim Gun-woo, a young boxer who rises to world champion status while fighting a global underground boxing league alongside his partner Hong Woo-jin (played by Lee Sang-yi). The show dropped its second season on April 3, three years after Season 1, and within three days had climbed to #2 on Netflix's non-English TV chart, according to the platform's official Tudum rankings.

The physicality of the role makes a stunt double impractical, Woo explained. Boxing sequences filmed shirtless leave nowhere to hide: every muscle, every stance, every swing is exposed. "I have no memory of using a double," he said. "It was so grueling that I thought about using AI to swap my face onto someone else. But you have to take your shirt off, and everyone's boxing form is different, a double just wouldn't work."

To prepare for the championship-level fighter he portrays in Season 2, Woo gained 5kg compared to his Season 1 physique, aiming for a heavier, more powerful presence on screen. The training and repeated impact scenes left him in near-constant pain. "My thigh muscles were gone. I took muscle relaxants every day. There were so many scenes where I took hits that eventually I couldn't turn my neck," he recalled.

Despite all of that, Woo says action has become his favorite mode of performance. "The great thing about action is that you can see the result immediately on set," he said. "With romance or comedy, you need music, editing, a lot of post-production before you know if it worked. With action, you watch the monitor right after and you know. When everything lands exactly as you rehearsed, the dopamine and adrenaline hit instantly."

The raw, bare-knuckle style of Bloodhounds 2 has drawn comparisons to Ma Dong-seok's The Roundup franchise, another Korean action series known for its visceral, impact-heavy fight scenes. Woo welcomed the comparison warmly. "I think we could both be frontrunners representing Korean action," he said. "There's a lot of talk about what it would be like if the Roundup and Bloodhounds universes crossed over." He added that he recently met Ma Dong-seok in person, and the senior actor told him, "You're doing really well."

Woo's opponents in Season 2 are no less formidable than the real actors playing them. He squares off against an actual MMA fighter named Aziz Bek in a championship bout, and faces singer-actor Jung Ji-hoon, better known as Rain, as the season's primary villain. "Just looking at them was intimidating," Woo said.

Beyond the action, Bloodhounds 2 deepens the bond between Kim Gun-woo and Hong Woo-jin, a dynamic that co-star Lee Sang-yi has described as bromelo, a portmanteau of bromance and romance. Woo was effusive about his on-screen partner. "Sang-yi is the actor I've had the most chemistry with in my entire career. More than that, he's just a genuinely good person. I can't imagine Hong Woo-jin as anyone else. We need each other."

That goodness seems to have rubbed off. Woo said he's grown so attached to the character of Kim Gun-woo, described by director Kim Joo-hwan as almost naively pure-hearted, that he's even considered naming a future son Gun-woo. "I think his goodness is inside me now," he said. "In Season 1, I told the director I couldn't play someone this unconditionally kind. But he believed in me. He said, 'You can do this. That part of you exists.' And I think he was right."