Next Role: Vampire?

It was that bare, makeup-free face — seated at a long table in neat clothes, script in hand, completely sunk into the read-through. Slightly pale lips. And the water bottle in front of him, already empty, as if his throat had gone bone-dry from all that reading.

This was the script reading for Vampire, the new film by Jang Jae-hyun, the director Korea calls its master of the occult.

Honestly, the news hit me out of nowhere. Yoo Ah-in's comeback had been in the air for a while — but Hyun-wook, in a vampire film?

I once made a little wish, you see. That someday he'd play a cool, eerie vampire — pale face, faded gaze, lips the only splash of red. I basically prayed to the heavens for it. And now, just like that — dreams come true? (😂)

Of course, whether he actually plays a vampire is still unknown. So far, Korean press says he's playing a U.S. Army second lieutenant with a hidden agenda. A U.S. Army officer — that means some serious English acting, doesn't it? And if I get to hear English come out of his mouth, I might just twist up like a pretzel from sheer joy.

But here's the thing — why do roles steeped in "hidden agendas" and "mystery" fit this young man, barely in his mid-twenties, so perfectly? It's not the first time, either. Remember that face in the washed-out photograph — Shin A-hwi?

D.P. Season 2 — the incident at that frontline guard post, cut off entirely from the outside world. A soldier near the end of his service, standing dead center of it all, holding the key to a knot that never fully untangled, playing a youth caving in on himself under the weight of the system — that was Choi Hyun-wook.

What's astonishing is that around the very same time, he was playing Su-ho — that bright, boundlessly energetic guardian angel — in Weak Hero. And then he shaved his head clean and crossed over to the complete opposite side.

A face honed cold, defiance dripping from every gesture, a quiet madness flickering across his expression. That air of hiding something, of being utterly unreadable. It helped that director Han Jun-hee shot the episode like an indie film, like a mystery thriller.

Here's a behind-the-scenes bit I truly love. The most iconic shot in the "Charred Remains" episode — him loaded onto a military truck, a cigarette clamped crooked between his lips, taunting Captain Lim.

Hyun-wook wanted A-hwi's smoking to look a little different from the script — a bit more stylish. But how easy is it for a raw rookie to pitch ideas in front of veterans? So he lingered around the director on purpose, fiddling with a lighter exactly the way he'd imagined it. Director Han caught on — and that's how the now-iconic cigarette scene was born.

Following his career, I always wondered — how does a rookie this young pull off ad-libs this fearless? Turns out that boldness traces back to the mental toughness he built as a baseball player.

In the behind-the-scenes for his latest film, Notes from the Last Row, even in his first-ever scene opposite Choi Min-sik, he threw in an ad-lib. In the scene where Heo Mun-ho offers to cover Lee Kang's part-time wages if he'll come to his literature class, Hyun-wook smirks and shoots back, "Why? You into me?" — and that was improvised. The set burst into laughter, and that take made the final cut.

Ad-libbing on his very first take, opposite an actor like that — the nerve.

Let me be honest — Hyun-wook isn't your textbook pretty boy. Not the flawlessly chiseled type. And yet the offers never stop. Why?

I think it comes down to his eyes and his charisma. Directors keep telling him, "You've got good eyes." The moment he's on screen, your gaze is already on him before you can explain why. That's the thing people call charisma.

And here, there's a distinct sense of him as a "post-Yoo Ah-in." Similar bone structure, similar aura. But here I want to open up Yoo Ah-in's filmography for a moment. Because that's where the answer to "why Yoo Ah-in" lies.

Since his debut, Yoo Ah-in has repeatedly played one particular grain of character. He said it himself at the Wandeugi press event — that his roles were consistently "rebels, people resentful of society, sons defying their parents, characters in dire circumstances or with a knot of resentment lodged in their chest."

Wandeugi's Do Wan-deuk is the classic example — a rebel raised in a poor home, bad at school but unbeatable in a fight, a boy who slowly opens his heart after meeting a meddlesome teacher. For a long time, "rebel" was Yoo Ah-in's defining word.

Now picture Hyun-wook's uniformed roles. Su-ho in Weak Hero, Ho-su in High Cookie, Lee Kang in Notes from the Last Row — precarious, faintly rebellious boys standing before the walls of reality. Doesn't the grain overlap? "Post-Yoo Ah-in" isn't just about faces — it's the public's instinct about this very lineage.

Of all Yoo Ah-in's work, the drama I recommend most is Secret Love Affair.

In it, there's an "elegant" servant named Hye-won. In an organization where backstabbing is routine, she wears the elegant title of planning director at an arts foundation — but in truth she's little more than a servant cleaning up the grubby dirty work of the wealthy. She's cold enough, professional enough, to scoff evenly even while listening to a recording of her husband dismissing her as a mere business arrangement.

And then the piano prodigy Sun-jae — her soulmate, the role Yoo Ah-in plays — appears.

On that vicious chessboard of black and white, Hye-won knows she's nothing more than a pawn. And still she struggles on — for success, status, a step up the social ladder. But Sun-jae carries the Hye-won of that flat chessboard into another black-and-white world — the piano, where emotion moves with melody and heart and body stir. The purity she'd thrown away. When she finally sets down all the hollow prestige she'd chased her whole life, only Sun-jae remains beside her.

Truly, a masterpiece I recommend. You can find it on Netflix.

Now, let me turn properly back to the actor Yoo Ah-in. If you've followed Korean content for a while, you know the weight this name carries. A few years ago, he stepped away after a serious controversy.

His most recent film, The Match, was superb beyond argument. Unlike his other work, which usually lands like a punch, his turn as a real-life baduk (Go) prodigy here was deeply restrained — not a thread out of place.

And his comeback film became Vampire — the new occult work from Jang Jae-hyun, the director who drew ten million viewers with Exhuma.