The K-Factor: Daniel Dae Kim’s homecoming and the new era of global culture

“K-Everything brings our audiences inside the creativity and innovation driving Korea’s influence across music, film, food and beauty, and why it continues to captivate people around the world.”

When preparing for K-Everything, Lee and her team looked at how the other organisations talked about South Korean culture. “We felt there was a lack of understanding where this all started from—the genesis,” says Lee, who grew up in South Korea before moving to the US for university. Existing publications covering South Korean culture “skimmed the surface, where it was more about the beautiful aspect of K-pop, K-drama, K-beauty, how cool they are and the viral social media moments. But K-culture didn’t form just recently. It’s deeply rooted in the ups and downs of the nation’s history. I really wanted us to be sophisticated in the storytelling process.”

Kim was Lee’s perfect storytelling candidate. “We were looking for someone who has that connectivity but also had the curiosity to relearn about their country,” she says. “Daniel, who was born in South Korea and grew up in the US, toggles between both worlds, and he was able to look at [Korean culture] from a different lens. That was really important. We wanted to make sure that this content was made for an international audience, especially an American audience.”

K-Everything highlights how South Korean culture has made an impact on trends that were, until recently, dominated by western standards. During one segment of the show, it is reported that 130,000 foreign visitors travelled to Seoul in 2024 for plastic surgery; many also visit beauty parlours to buy skincare when they travel to Seoul. The market for Korean beauty products and services have become so prominent globally that, according to a 2026 BBC article, in the first half of 2025, South Korea overtook France, the birthplace of modern cosmetics, to become the world’s second-largest exporter of beauty products, after the US.

The show also goes some way to highlighting the importance of having an open mind about “foreign” concepts. For one episode, Kim visited a snail mucin factory to learn about the production process behind an ingredient synonymous with Korean beauty. “When you think about snail slime, it sounds a little bit gross, but then the origins of snail slime in make-up comes from the escargot industry in France,” he says. “People who were handling the snails for escargot were finding their hands [were becoming] softer. That’s where the make-up application idea started. But somehow escargot is not as gross a concept as snail mucin [even though] they’re the same exact thing.”

Don’t miss: Daniel Wu stays in Hollywood to forge a way for the next generation

He and the CNN team spent months on the ground, visiting people across industries: K-pop star Taeyang and the K-Pop Demon Hunters creators; beauty influencers and cosmetic surgeons; chefs, photo studio founders, academics and more. At the end of every interview, Kim asked his subjects to describe Korean culture in five words, which revealed an unexpected link between almost every sector of Korean society. “I was surprised to learn that there was only one answer that almost every interview subject gave that was in common,” he says. “That answer was ‘competitive’”. While he knew the culture was driven, he hadn’t realised how pervasive that feeling was.

Kim, who also served as executive producer on the show, reflects that this fierce drive is rooted in history. “You don’t rise from the ashes of a war to one of the most advanced cultures in the world in a couple of generations without competition,” he says. “There is a fierce drive and ambition in the people of that culture that has allowed them to succeed”.

That competitiveness is seen most prominently in the K-pop industry. “In Korea, there is a complex system that guides every performer who wants to go into the arts, especially music. The training starts for kids who are as young as ten or 12 years old,” he says. “It means they have to know they want it at a very early age. It’s almost the opposite experience from what I had.”

Read more: Two decades in the making: here’s how K-pop rises from small waves to global glory

Kim graduated with a degree in political science and theatre from Haverford College, a liberal arts institution where he dabbled in acting. He moved to New York to pursue a career on the stage, before pursuing a master’s of fine arts at New York University. He soon found himself being cast in small roles in film and TV, then, in 2004, he was cast as Jin-Soo Kwon in Lost, and became a household name.

While there has been increased representation in the entertainment industry in recent years, at the start of his career, there were very few Asian role models and no established path for Kim to follow. “I had to have an almost unreasonable belief in myself,” he says. “I had to be willing to chart a path where there wasn’t much of one. Looking back, it was a very risky thing to do.” His unrelenting love for the arts, however, “was some kind of a magnetic pull. I just felt really compelled to become an actor,” he recalls. “I was watching TV, film, theatre and everything around me, and thinking I can contribute to [the industry] in a positive way that’s outside of the whole semiotics or racial representation element of the conversation. I never really thought that I was doing this to make a statement about race.”

But it soon became obvious that the way he looked affected the roles people would allow him to play, and he realised he had to become a part of the conversation. “The more I succeeded in this business, the more I was able to recognise and identify the ways that race affected my path as an Asian American actor,” he says.

In the 2025 thriller Butterfly, he plays a former US intelligence operative now based in South Korea, who is haunted by his past. But he is more excited about having produced the series, which was filmed in South Korea and features a primarily Asian cast, including South Korean actors Park Hae Soo, Kim Ji Hoon and Kim Tae Hee and Japanese American actor Reina Hardesty.

“I’m so immensely proud of that show because it encompassed so many of the things that I’ve always believed in and fought for,” says Kim. “I only started being a producer because I saw that the people making decisions [about a character’s experiences and behaviour] were not the actors, [they] were the producers creating a role or a world … Very often, the character is written by someone who has no knowledge of the nuances between ethnicity and nationality.” But with more representation on both sides of the camera, he says, there have recently “been so many more roles for Asian Americans and people of colour in general than there ever have been just on a sheer numbers basis.”

Read more: A united front: Asian Americans speak up on #StopAsianHate and why it matters

Butterfly gave Kim the opportunity to show Korea the way he sees it as a Korean American; to “showcase a culture to an American audience through the English language in the way that I know it. In those ways I was able to bridge a couple of cultures I’ve always wanted to [connect] because there are both of those cultures are very close to my heart.”

Going ahead, as well as taking on fictional roles such as Fire Lord Ozai in the popular live-action The Last Airbender franchise on Netflix, which second season will be coming out in June, Kim is also looking forward to more work in the non-fiction spaces. As an actor, he has always chosen projects based on his personal interests and a production team’s creative approach, not just because his heritage fits a role.

With K-Everything, Kim hopes to highlight the power of diversity. “People from other cultures are becoming demonised as opposed to understood as human beings. Shows like this are important because they encourage us to step outside of our own experience to learn how people from other parts of the world live, and through that learning comes an understanding of how another culture has succeeded, thrived or failed,” he says. “Through all of those things, we’re able to find that we’re all very similar.”

NOW READ

11 arts and culture events in May: Mona Lisa and Bruce Lee exhibitions, The Sleeping Beauty and more

Review: What the The Devil Wears Prada’sequel tells us about journalism today

Will Or on acting in the Golden Horse award-winning A Foggy Tale and choosing kindness in desperate times

Credits

Senior Editor: Zabrina Lo
Creative Direction: Zoe Yau
Photographer: Damien Fry
Stylist: SK Tang
Digital Tech: Daniel Torres
Photo Assistant: James Dean
Styling Assistant: Juliana Nava Prado
Production Assistant: Daz Cordeaux