Ahn Hyo-seop

Ahn Hyo-seop, known internationally as Paul Ahn, is a Korean-Canadian actor born in Seoul on April 17, 1995. His family moved to Canada when he was seven, and he later returned to South Korea as a teenager to pursue entertainment. He trained under JYP Entertainment before beginning his screen career; he was also a member of the project group One O One, formed by Starhaus Entertainment, until the group disbanded in 2019. His earliest television appearances included MBC’s 2015 drama Splash Splash Love and the 2016 series One More Happy Ending. He became more familiar through supporting parts in Happy Home, Entertainer, and My Father Is Strange. In 2017, he took his first leading role in the three-episode fantasy romance Queen of the Ring, opposite Kim Seul-gi. In 2018’s Still 17, he played Yoo Chan, a rowing captain who treats Yang Se-jong’s Gong Woo-jin as his uncle. Ahn’s profile rose sharply with Abyss (2019), in which he and Park Bo-young portray people revived in different bodies by a supernatural marble. He then joined the second season of Dr. Romantic as Seo Woo-jin, a but debt-burdened surgeon who arrives at Doldam Hospital. The role brought him the 2020 SBS Drama Awards’ Excellence Award in a Miniseries Fantasy Drama and a Best Couple award with Lee Sung-kyung. He reprised Seo in Dr. Romantic 3, released in 2023. In 2021, he starred in SBS’s historical fantasy Lovers of the Red Sky as Ha Ram, an astronomer whose body contains a demon. His 2022 romantic-comedy hit Business Proposal paired him with Kim Se-jeong: he played Kang Tae-moo, the CEO who discovers that his blind-date partner is an employee impersonating her friend. Netflix released A Time Called You in 2023, casting Ahn as Nam Si-heon and Koo Yeon-jun in its Korean adaptation of the Taiwanese drama Someday or One Day. Outside acting, Ahn speaks English, reflecting his Canadian schooling, and he has used the name Paul Ahn in English-language contexts. In 2022, after leaving Starhaus Entertainment, he established his own agency, The Present Company. His casting across romance, medical drama, historical fantasy, and time-travel melodrama has made his performances accessible both domestically and internationally through broadcasters SBS and MBC as well as Netflix, while his major television leads have repeatedly placed him opposite actors including Kim Se-jeong, Lee Sung-kyung, Kim Yoo-jung, Park Bo-young, and Jeon Yeo-been. These collaborations mark distinct chapters in a career spanning television formats.