Kim Seon-ho Would Like You To Stop Calling Him A Rom-Com Guy

For the better part of a decade, Kim Seon-ho has been carrying the romantic-lead torch for Korean television. Start-Up gave us second-lead syndrome; Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha turned him into a small-town fantasy; and then the recent Can This Love Be Translated? confirmed that the man can sell longing across language barriers, time zones, and the occasional astronaut subplot. He is, by most reasonable metrics, the rom-com lead of his generation.

Which is exactly why his next three projects are interesting. Stepping away from romance, Seon-ho is looking towards playing a civil servant possessed by a dead politician, a hacker trying to untangle a suicide, and a painter with some strange vampire twist.

Here is everything we can expect from the heartthrob next.

Portraits of Delusion

The one everyone's already talking about, mostly because it reunites him with Bae Suzy — the Start-Up co-star whose character he famously did not end up with. 

Directed by Han Jae-rim and adapted from Hongjacga's webtoon, the series is set in 1935 Gyeongseong, with detours to 1800s Shanghai. Kim plays Yun I-ho, a struggling painter commissioned to paint Madam Song Jeong-hwa (Suzy), the reclusive owner of the Nammoon Hotel who hasn't been seen in public for decades. She is, of course, a vampire. He is, of course, going to fall for her anyway. The catch is that no artist who has taken this commission before him has left the house alive, or sane. 

Huh Joon-ho and Choi Hyun-wook round out the cast, with a Kim Young-kwang cameo for good measure. Expect it on Disney+ in the second half of 2026. 

May the Congressman Protect You

This is a pivot for him, and clearly a sharp one. Based on Kim Hyun-bin's web novel, this is a political drama with a ghost in it — though calling it supernatural undersells how much of the show is actually about the brutal mechanics of the National Assembly. 

Kim Yoon-seok plays Go Young-jin, a six-term lawmaker who dies by suicide in 2008 and wakes up in 1998 as a ghost only one person can see: Cha Jae-rim, a level-nine civil servant played by Kim Seon-ho. The dead politician and the nobody bureaucrat strike a deal. Young-jin's ghost essentially co-pilots Jae-rim's career, engineering his ascent through Korean politics. The complication: a living, breathing 1998 version of Go Young-jin is still out there, and he is not interested in being outmaneuvered by his own future ghost. 

Ryu Kyung-soo and Ahn Eun-jin also star. This is the closest thing Kim has done to a straight dramatic role in years. 

Unfriend

Also titled In the Net, and the most contemporary of the three. Adapted from Hong Kong author Chan Ho-kei's novel Second Sister, it follows Ai (Park Gyu-young), a woman trying to understand why her younger sister took her own life after being relentlessly harassed online. She hires N — Kim Seon-ho — a hacker with his own reasons for taking the job, and together they go down into the part of the internet most people pretend doesn't exist.

The show is written by Joo Won-gyu and co-directed by Kim Jee-woon (A Tale of Two Sisters and I Saw the Devil). It marks Kim's first project with Park Gyu-young, and a release is expected this year, though no official date has dropped.