9 bad boy K-drama characters we know we shouldn’t love

If Gu Jun-pyo is the prototype, Choi Young-do (Kim Woo-bin) is the upgrade with considerably more psychological damage.

Young-do is another chaebol heir, but where Jun-pyo is loud and impulsive, Young-do weaponises cruelty. He bullies classmates, enjoys getting under people’s skin and treats intimidation as a recreational activity. His relationship with Cha Eun-sang (Park Shin-hye) begins with antagonism rather than anything resembling romance.

What made him more tolerable was the glimpse of the boy underneath the performance. His difficult relationship with his father and complicated feelings about Kim Tan (Lee Min-ho) give the character a vulnerability that The Heirs slowly allows to surface.

Young-do is hardly a case study in healthy masculinity. But as a piece of K-drama character engineering, he is almost absurdly effective: give the audience a striking face, a bad attitude, a tragic backstory and just enough vulnerability, then see what happens.

See more: 5 C-drama red flags we somehow root for anyway

Park Sae-ro-yi (Park Seo-joon) doesn’t fit the usual bad-boy mould. He is stubborn, confrontational and spectacularly unwilling to bend when someone in authority tells him to. After standing up to a bully at school, he refuses to apologise and ends up expelled, setting off the chain of events that eventually leads him to open DanBam in Itaewon.

What distinguishes Sae-ro-yi from the chaebol troublemakers is his moral core. He isn’t interested in behaving badly for the sake of looking dangerous; he just has a very low tolerance for injustice and an almost pathological commitment to his principles.

His version of the archetype is therefore less “I can fix him” and more “he absolutely does not need fixing, but someone may need to stop him from walking directly into another wall.”

Let’s establish the obvious: Vincenzo Cassano (Song Joong-ki) is a criminal. The Korean-born Italian lawyer works as a consigliere for a mafia family. He returns to Seoul to recover gold hidden beneath Geumga Plaza, only to become embroiled in a battle with the corrupt Babel Group.

What makes Vincenzo such a deliciously outrageous character is that the drama never asks us to forget what he is. He is capable of violence, manipulation and murder. His moral code is flexible at best. Yet against villains who are considerably more monstrous, he becomes the closest thing the series has to a hero.

This character is one of K-drama’s most successful moral sleights of hand: make the mafia guy impeccably dressed, devastatingly competent and unexpectedly protective, and suddenly we are less concerned about his résumé.

Kim Do-gi (Lee Je-hoon) is not a bad boy in the conventional romantic sense. He is something more interesting: a former soldier who works for Rainbow Taxi, a clandestine service that delivers revenge to victims who have been failed by the law.

As a driver for Rainbow Taxi, Do-gi helps clients seek revenge against people who escaped justice. His methods can be brutal, calculated and occasionally downright frightening. Unlike a traditional villain, his violence has a clear target. The drama repeatedly places him in morally murky territory while keeping the audience firmly on his side.

That makes Do-gi a useful evolution of the K-drama bad boy. The old version broke rules because he was spoiled. The modern version breaks them because he has decided the rules aren’t enough.

If Vincenzo is the criminal we’re encouraged to root for, Jang Joon-woo (Ok Taec-yeon) is the reminder that charm can be considerably more dangerous.

Initially introduced as an apparently harmless, slightly goofy intern at Wusang Law Firm, Joon-woo gradually reveals himself to be the real power behind Babel Group. His cheerful façade masks an increasingly ruthless personality, and the contrast between the two versions of him becomes one of the show’s central pleasures.

Joon-woo isn’t really a romantic bad boy; he is an outright villain. But he belongs on this list because he demonstrates another reason K-dramas are so good at creating magnetic troublemakers: sometimes the fun isn’t wondering whether the bad boy will become good. It’s watching everyone else realise he is bad.

See more: 11 K-drama villains with unexpectedly heartbreaking backstories

Han Seo-jun (Hwang In-youp) arrives with virtually every visual shorthand the K-drama industry has for a troublemaker: motorcycle, headphones, intimidating stare and a tendency to pick fights.

At first, he seems to exist largely to make life difficult for Lee Su-ho (Cha Eun-woo) and Lim Ju-gyeong (Moon Ga-young). But True Beauty gradually peels back his aggression to reveal a young man dealing with grief, loyalty and the loss of someone close to him. This emotional vulnerability is what moves Seo-jun beyond generic bad-boy territory. He is still prickly, competitive and occasionally infuriating, but the drama makes his rough exterior feel less like a personality and more like armour.

He is also a textbook example of the second-lead phenomenon: the man who may not get the girl, but absolutely gets the fandom.

See more: Side couples: 9 K-drama second leads who need their own series

Kang Yo-han (Ji Sung) has the kind of authority that would make most people behave responsibly. Instead, he turns the courtroom into a televised spectacle and dispenses justice according to a philosophy that becomes increasingly difficult to categorise.

As the chief judge of a dystopian trial system, Yo-han is charismatic, calculating and almost impossible to read. Whether he is manipulating the public, intimidating an opponent or quietly pursuing his own agenda, he always seems to be several moves ahead.

Unlike other bad boy K-drama characters on this list, he sits somewhere between antihero and potential villain, which is exactly where this particular archetype thrives. You don’t necessarily trust him; you just become increasingly invested in finding out what he is going to do next.

Before he becomes entangled in a murder case that turns his life upside down, Park Chang-ho (Lee Jong-suk) is an underperforming lawyer with an unfortunate reputation for talking big and delivering very little. Then he is framed as the notorious con artist known as ‘Big Mouse’ and thrown into prison, where survival requires him to become considerably harder and more ruthless than the man who entered.

His transformation makes him a particularly modern kind of bad boy. Chang-ho doesn’t start dangerous; circumstances force him to develop the qualities he needs to survive. The fun is watching the distinction between pretending to be dangerous and actually becoming dangerous slowly disappear.

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