From Manual Labor to Netflix #1: Yoon Kyung-ho on Finally Making It After 25 Years

Yoon Kyung-ho is calling his current fame a lottery win, and given that Kim Bujang just wrapped with a 23% national rating on Nielsen Korea and spent three consecutive weeks at #1 on Netflix's non-English show chart, the comparison doesn't feel like false modesty.

The SBS Friday-Saturday drama made history as the first simultaneous broadcast title to top Netflix's official Tudum chart in the non-English category for three straight weeks. The 46-year-old actor, who plays Park Jin-cheol, met with reporters at a café in Cheongdam-dong, Seoul on July 27, and spent much of the interview trying to talk himself back down to earth.

"I'm not sure I deserve this moment, it feels like a miracle," he said. "I've prepared every project with the same commitment, so I genuinely don't know how to interpret this much love. All I can say is, if luck exists, it seems to be visiting me right now."

Park Jin-cheol is the kind of character built for payoff: a former deployed soldier who now quietly directs traffic outside an elementary school, firmly under the thumb of his Marine brigadier general wife, living for his daughter. Harmless, even a little soft, until his best friend Kim Bujang (So Ji-sub) has his only daughter kidnapped, at which point Park Jin-cheol becomes something else entirely. The combination of laughs and catharsis that followed was a big part of why the show worked.

For the fight sequences, Yoon went back to boxing, which he had trained for roughly four years during his theater days. He ended up performing almost all the action himself, not entirely by choice. "We had a stunt double, but the size difference was too obvious," he said. "The director kept saying you could tell it wasn't me, so I ended up doing most of it myself, half willingly, half not."

One of Kim Bujang's most cited strengths is the chemistry between its three lead dads: So Ji-sub, Yoon Kyung-ho, and Choi Dae-hoon. Yoon says the bond read as real because it largely was. "By the end, it felt like So Ji-sub and Choi Dae-hoon were actually my friends," he recalled. "When the three of us walked out onto the street after filming the happy ending, I was genuinely laughing. It didn't feel like a scene."

The broader success story here is how late it arrived. Yoon debuted in theater in 1999 and spent the bulk of the next two decades working in near-total obscurity, taking on manual labor and odd jobs to get by. He came close to quitting. "I couldn't bear watching my child grow up struggling because of her father's dream," he said, visibly emotional. After his daughter was born, the calculus shifted: "I stopped thinking about being the best. I just thought, I'll go anywhere I can act."

His wider profile only really started building in the last couple of years. The Netflix medical series Trauma Center (2024) gave him a cult following under the nickname "Yurim-ping" for his role as a colorectal surgery chief. Then the film Zombie Daughter and the Tving series Becoming a Legendary Army Cook both hit, and suddenly Yoon Kyung-ho was everywhere.

Before the dramas, it was variety shows that first caught on to him. Appearances on the web show Pinggyego and tvN's Eojjeoda Sajang surfaced his natural, fast-talking charm to audiences who hadn't encountered him on screen. He admits that period was complicated. "After more than 20 years of building something through acting, getting this much attention in a short time through variety, it was a little disorienting," he said carefully.

What settled it was a letter from a fan at a signing event. The fan wrote that if Yoon's acting hadn't been there, the variety-show persona alone wouldn't have been enough to win them over. "That was the comfort I needed," he said, getting emotional again. "I'm going to try not to let myself get too high or too low going forward."

He describes himself as a "stock market actor", the kind whose value goes up and, eventually, comes back down. He says he reminds himself each morning that yesterday's moment belongs to yesterday. It's a grounded read of an industry that has a well-documented habit of cycling through its favorites.

"This popularity is just a passing lottery ticket," he said. "My dream is to keep acting for the rest of my life and share the same era as audiences for as long as possible. I want my career to stretch out like a long strand of noodles."

On the question of Kim Bujang Season 2, which SBS is reportedly in discussions to greenlight, Yoon is enthusiastic and characteristically funny about it. So Ji-sub has already said publicly he wants it to happen. "I want it too, whatever story they come up with," Yoon said. "And if I get to play Park Jin-cheol again, I'll make sure my body can actually fit through a car sunroof this time."