New directions? 8 K-drama stars who made bold career moves in 2026

Nam Joo-hyuk could have returned to the sort of role that first made him a familiar face to K-drama audiences: the appealing young man at the centre of a romance. Instead, The East Palace sends him into a haunted royal court, armed with a blade and the ability to cross into the realm of the dead.

As Gu-cheon, he is summoned by a king whose sons are dying under mysterious circumstances. His reluctant assignment is to find the spirit responsible and break the curse before the royal line is wiped out. Gu-cheon is irreverent where the court is fearful, and initially treats the supernatural world as an aggravating part of his job rather than a source of wonder.

The contrast with Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok-joo (2016–2017) and Twenty-Five Twenty-One (2022) is plain enough without needing to declare a reinvention. This time, Nam has to carry a story built around occult mystery, palace politics and a partnership with a court lady who can hear the dead. After his military service, he has returned not to a familiar love story but to a world where even the living cannot be trusted.

Song Kang in ‘Four Hands, Two Sonatas’

Song Kang’s return to television comes with a piano rather than a supernatural romance. After military service and a run of projects that included Sweet Home (2020–2024) and My Demon (2023–2024), he leads Four Hands, Two Sonatas, a youth drama set in the competitive world of an elite performing-arts school.

His character, Kang Bi-o, is a gifted pianist whose life is unsettled by the arrival of Choi Jeong-yo (Lee Jun-young), a talented newcomer who once abandoned music. Their relationship moves between rivalry, friendship and deeper feelings, with a third musician, Hong Jae-in (Jang Gyu-ri), complicating the dynamic.

The musical setting is not entirely unfamiliar territory: in the 2024 film Escape, Song made an appearance as a classical pianist. Here, the instrument is no passing detail. It sits at the centre of the story, demanding a different kind of performance from an actor whose recent high-profile work has often involved fantasy, romance or horror. The question is not whether he can return to the screen, but what kind of leading man audiences will meet when he does.

Lee Do-hyun in ‘Grand Galaxy Hotel’

Lee Do-hyun spent part of his military service watching Exhuma (2024) become a major box-office success. The film, in which he played the young shaman Bong-gil, gave audiences a reminder of his range while he was away from television. His next screen role brings him back to fantasy, but with a very different job description.

In Grand Galaxy Hotel, Lee plays Eun-ha, a prickly new owner who takes charge of a hotel for departed souls after its previous proprietor disappears. The series belongs to the same fictional universe as Hotel Del Luna (2019), though the central mystery now begins with a change in management—and the secrets Eun-ha carries with him.

There is an appealing tension in returning to a supernatural setting after Exhuma: Lee is not leaving the uncanny behind, but moving from a film steeped in shamanic ritual to a television fantasy where the dead are guests and the hotel has to keep running. Eun-ha’s brusque manner is only part of the problem. The reason for it remains buried in his past, and the story asks viewers to check in before they know what they are getting into.

Koo Kyo-hwan in ‘We Are All Trying Here’ and ‘Colony’ 

Koo Kyo-hwan’s 2026 has taken him from a film about an unfinished love story to a television drama about a man who cannot get his own life moving, before throwing him into a zombie outbreak. The variety is the point.

In We Are All Trying Here, he plays Hwang Dong-man, a would-be filmmaker consumed by insecurity and frustration as he watches others find success. Dong-man is not the sort of protagonist who wins people over with effortless competence. His ambition is tangled up with envy, self-doubt and the suspicion that time is running out. Koo lets those less flattering qualities sit in the foreground.

Then Colony, directed by Yeon Sang-ho, puts him in a very different kind of crisis. Koo plays Seo Young-cheol, one of the people trapped in a sealed facility after a rapidly mutating virus turns a biotechnology conference into a fight for survival. The film also stars Jun Ji-hyun as a professor trying to stay alive as the infected begin to change.

Koo’s path to mainstream recognition has been less conventional than that of many leading men. His earlier work in independent cinema gave him room to inhabit odd, volatile and difficult characters; 2026 has placed that sensibility before a much larger audience. He is not required to make every character sympathetic. In Dong-man, especially, the uncomfortable moments are the ones that linger.

See more: Koo Kyo-hwan K-dramas and films to watch before ‘Snowfall’

Jun Ji-hyun in ‘Colony’

Jun Ji-hyun’s return to cinemas comes after an 11-year gap between big-screen roles. The actor, whose film career includes My Sassy Girl (2001), The Thieves (2012) and Assassination (2015), has spent much of that time moving between major television projects and the kind of public visibility few Korean stars can match. Colony puts her back in a film theatre with something decidedly less glamorous to contend with than a romantic misunderstanding.

She plays Kwon Se-jung, a biotechnology professor caught inside a facility sealed off after a virus begins producing increasingly dangerous mutations. As the infected transform, the survivors have to work out how to escape and whether the people around them can still be trusted.

The film reunites Jun with a director known for making familiar genres feel physically unsettling. Rather than asking her to reprise the poised, larger-than-life persona audiences may associate with her, Colony makes her a scientist under pressure, surrounded by a crisis she cannot solve from a safe distance. Her next project, the fantasy romantic comedy Human X Gumiho, is expected in 2027, but Colony is the immediate return worth noting: a big-screen lead in a film that gives glamour very little room to survive.

Ong Seong-wu in ‘Spooky in Love’

Ong Seong-wu’s first television project after military service does not give him the easy task of winning over the audience. In Spooky in Love, he plays Kang Min-hwan, an ambitious hotel heir whose polished exterior conceals a more antagonistic streak. It is Ong’s first villainous role since his acting debut.

The series expands the supernatural-romance premise of the 2011 film Spellbound. Its central love story follows a chaebol heiress who can see ghosts and a prosecutor drawn into her strange circumstances, while Ong’s character brings the hotel business—and its ambitions—into the mix.

For an actor who first became widely known through the idol group Wanna One before building a screen career, the move carries two kinds of pressure: returning after enlistment and asking viewers to accept him as someone who may be working against the leads. A villain does not have to be louder or more theatrical than a romantic lead; sometimes the sharper test is whether an actor can make ambition feel threatening without turning it into a caricature. Kang Min-hwan gives Ong room to try.

The K-drama stars who made bold career moves in 2026 have not all been chasing transformation for its own sake. For some, the year has meant stepping back into public view after military service; for others, it has meant finding new audiences in film, taking on less flattering characters or carrying a story that does not depend on romance. The choices are different, and so are the risks.

Kim Seon-ho in ‘Can This Love Be Translated?’

Kim Seon-ho’s screen appeal has often depended on the distance between what a character says and what he is feeling. In Can This Love Be Translated?, that gap becomes his profession. He plays Joo Ho-jin, a multilingual interpreter hired to work with Cha Mu-hee (Go Youn-jung), an actress whose sudden fame has made her life a public spectacle.

Ho-jin is skilled at translating other people’s words, but less comfortable dealing with his own emotions. When he accompanies Mu-hee on a reality programme that takes them across countries and languages, he becomes the person responsible for making her understood, even as their differences make perfect translation impossible.

The role gives Kim a romance built around miscommunication without making him simply another charming man waiting for the heroine to fall for him. He is introspective, reserved and more at ease handling someone else’s thoughts than exposing his own. The Hong sisters, whose previous fantasy romances include Hotel Del Luna (2019), set the story across a wider landscape than a conventional office or neighbourhood romance. Kim’s task is to make the silences between the characters carry as much weight as the words he translates.

See more: Clean slates: How 6 Korean stars bounced back from scandal

Jung Ho-yeon in ‘Hope’

Jung Ho-yeon’s first film role since Squid Game (2021) places her in a remote village where the threat is not another contestant but something that may not be human at all. In Na Hong-jin’s science-fiction thriller Hope, she plays Im Sung-ae, a rookie police officer caught up in a fight to protect the community after mysterious creatures arrive near the Demilitarised Zone.

The film is a long way from the enclosed games and shifting alliances that made Jung internationally recognisable. Set in a pre-smartphone era, Hope sends its villagers and police into a crisis with few modern conveniences to rely on. Sung-ae has to act quickly, often in the middle of the chaos, alongside more experienced figures played by Hwang Jung-min and Zo In-sung.

Na’s first film since The Wailing (2016) premiered in competition at Cannes before its South Korean release in July. For Jung, the project means returning to the screen in an ensemble film with an unusually international cast, including Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander. Rather than building the story around her fame, the film gives her a practical role in a community fighting for its survival.

No single template defines a successful career in Korean entertainment. Nam Joo-hyuk and Song Kang are using post-service projects to explore new material; Lee Do-hyun is returning with the added weight of a major film success; Koo Kyo-hwan is moving between independent sensibilities and mainstream scale. Jun Ji-hyun and Jung Ho-yeon, meanwhile, are using cinema to explore opportunities beyond television, while Ong Seong-wu is testing a new kind of screen character and Kim Seon-ho is revisiting the genre that first established his appeal.

Ultimately, the K-drama stars who made bold career moves in 2026 are worth monitoring not simply because of the projects they have chosen, but because of what those decisions could mean for their careers. Some are testing unfamiliar territory; others are building on success in a different medium, while a few are finding their way back to audiences. Their next choices may prove just as revealing as the ones they made this year.

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