6 best Jing Boran C-dramas and movies to watch, from ‘The Early Spring’ to ‘Us and Them’

Jing Boran’s Us and Them, available for streaming on Netflix, is a bittersweet romantic film that centres on Lin Jianqing (Jing Boran) and Fang Xiaoxiao (Zhou Dongyu), two young people whose chance meeting on a train blossoms into a romance as they try to build a life together in Beijing. But ambition and life’s harsh realities gradually wear them down, and as their dreams begin to crumble, their relationship collapses under the weight of it all.

Ten years later, they cross paths again, forcing them to confront what they once shared and the circumstances that ultimately pulled them apart. The film’s movement between past and present gives Jing Boran room to portray Jianqing at different stages of his life, from an optimistic young man in love to someone looking back on the choices that shaped him.

Jing Boran and Zhou Dongyu form the emotional core of the film, bringing a lived-in quality to a romance defined as much by timing and circumstance as it is by love. The story later found new life in Once We Were Us, a 2025 South Korean remake starring Koo Kyo-hwan and Moon Ga-young. Like the original, the film follows a former couple who reunite after ten years and revisit the relationship that once defined their lives.

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In 2015, Jing Boran starred in the big-budget 3D fantasy adventure film Monster Hunt as Song Tianyin, a good-natured but naive village mayor thrust into an unlikely alliance with Huo Xiaolan (Bai Baihe), an aspiring monster hunter, to protect Wuba, the newborn heir to the monster kingdom.

Audiences who are only now getting to know the actor, perhaps from The Early Spring, are in for a surprise. In Monster Hunt, Jing Boran leans into the physical comedy and high fantasy, while still giving the character enough warmth to make his unlikely bond with the CGI-animated Wuba believable.

Highly enjoyable and family-friendly, the film became a huge hit in China and spawned Monster Hunt 2 in 2018, with Jing Boran and Bai Baihe reprising their roles and Hong Kong star Tony Leung joining the cast.

Jing Boran takes on a more restrained romantic role in Road Home, the C-drama adapted from Mo Bao Fei Bao’s novel of the same name. The second-chance romance pairs the actor opposite Tan Songyun, best known internationally for Go Ahead, as former first loves who find their way back to each other after a decade apart.

Lu Yanchen (Jing Boran) and Gui Xiao (Tan Songyun) are childhood sweethearts, young and idealistic enough to believe that their relationship can last forever. But when Lu Yanchen is sent away to train as a special police officer and Gui Xiao’s family life implodes, distance and circumstance prove too much for them, and they break up. When they meet again years later, long-buried feelings resurface, and they seize their second chance at love.

In the role, Jing Boran brings a quiet sense of yearning to the screen. Much of the character’s appeal lies in what he leaves unsaid: the lingering glances, held-back affection and sense that his feelings for Gui Xiao have survived the years apart. Paired with Tan Songyun’s equally understated performance, he creates the kind of slow-burning chemistry that makes Road Home especially satisfying for viewers looking to fall in love with the actor all over again.

Jing Boran swaps romance and adventure for court intrigue in A League of Nobleman, a historical mystery based on Da Feng Gua Guo’s novel The Mystery of Zhang Gong. In the C-drama, he plays Lan Jue, an assistant minister of rites whose composed, polished manner hides a past he’d rather keep buried.

When Lan Jue’s path crosses with Zhang Ping (Song Weilong), a scholar with more curiosity than money and an unconventional knack for reading a crime scene, they enter an uneasy partnership that oddly benefits from their yin and yang personalities: where Zhang Ping pushes and pries, Lan Jue deflects and calculates. Together, they work to solve mysteries and eventually expose corruption within the royal palace.

Besides the strong visual dynamic between Jing Boran and Song Weilong, their characters’ contrasting personalities drive much of the drama, providing both tension and occasional humour. With its intricate mysteries, political intrigue and atmospheric period setting, the C-drama also gives Jing Boran a chance to step well outside the romantic roles that feature elsewhere in his filmography.

Regeneration, the suspense thriller C-drama starring Jing Boran, places the actor at the centre of an elaborate mystery. The series opens with journalist He Shan (Zhou Yiran) invited to the memorial of Fei Ke (Jing Boran), alongside five other strangers who each turn out to have known a completely different version of the man.

As the group pieces together their memories of Fei Ke, the question of who he really was becomes increasingly difficult to answer. The C-drama gradually peels back the layers of his life through the stories of the people he encountered. But just as audiences begin to piece together a portrait of a cunning con artist, it becomes clear that there is more to their connections with Fei Ke than first meets the eye—and that each person has their own secrets to protect.

It's an unusual way to build a lead performance: Jing Boran never plays Fei Ke as a fixed character so much as a shifting one, reshaped by whoever is describing him. This makes Regeneration an especially compelling testament to the actor's versatility, requiring him to suggest entirely different versions of the same man without ever losing the mystery at the heart of the story.

Whether The Early Spring is the C-drama that first put Jing Boran on your radar or you’ve been following his career since Us and Them, his filmography has plenty more to offer, from tender romances to shape-shifting mysteries and full-blown fantasy adventure. However you found your way to him, there’s a good chance he’s about to become your next C-drama obsession.

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