Kim Hye-jun

Kim Hye-jun (born May 8, 1995) is a South Korean actor whose early screen recognition came through contrasting roles in film and streaming television. She studied theatre and film at Hanyang University after attending Hanlim Multi Art School. Her breakthrough film performance was as Ju-ri in Another Child (2019), the directorial debut of actor Kim Yoon-seok. The drama follows two teenage girls after they learn that their parents have had an affair and that one of the adults is pregnant. Ju-ri is the daughter of Mi-hee, played by Yum Jung-ah, and confronts the damage done by the adults’ choices. Kim Hye-jun received the Best New Actress award at the 40th Blue Dragon Film Awards for Another Child. That performance placed her beside established performers including Yum Jung-ah, Kim So-jin, and Kim Yoon-seok, who also appears in the film. A much wider international audience encountered her in Netflix’s period zombie series Kingdom. Across its 2019–2020 two-season run, she played Queen Consort Cho, the young queen whose father is Chief State Councillor Cho Hak-ju, played by Ryu Seung-ryong. The court’s succession crisis and the plague ravaging Joseon are entwined in her storyline: the queen conceals the truth about her pregnancy to secure an heir and preserve her family’s power. The role required Kim to make Queen Cho’s polished royal demeanor coexist with calculated cruelty and fear. In 2021, she led the JTBC black comedy and mystery Inspector Koo as Song Yi-kyung, also known as “K.” The character engineers deaths that look like accidents while playing a cat-and-mouse game with former police officer Koo Kyung-yi, portrayed by Lee Young-ae. Kim won the Best Actress in Television prize at the 58th Baeksang Arts Awards for the performance. Her work in Inspector Koo showed a deliberately theatrical villain unlike the constrained queen she had played in Kingdom. In 2022, Kim appeared in Disney+’s Korean science-fiction thriller Connect as Lee I-rang, opposite Jung Hae-in and Go Kyung-pyo. The series adapts Shin Dae-sung’s webtoon about a man whose eye is transplanted into a serial killer, creating a supernatural link between them. Kim returned to Disney+ in 2024’s A Shop for Killers as Jeong Ji-an. After her uncle Jeong Jin-man, played by Lee Dong-wook, dies, Ji-an discovers that his seemingly ordinary shopping site supplied professional killers. The action-thriller is based on Kang Ji-young’s novel The Killer’s Shopping Mall. It places Ji-an under siege by assassins targeting her uncle’s business network.