What Makes Kim Seon-ho So Appealing?

I came to K-dramas pretty late, but Kim Seon-ho was in the very first one I watched.

It was When Life Gives You Tangerines. He played Park Chung-seop, an artist type with a scruffy beard. At first I didn't pay him much attention. My focus was mostly on Yang Gwan-sik.

Looking back, When Life Gives You Tangerines had two great male actors, Park Bo-gum and Kim Seon-ho. But back then Park Bo-gum was the lead, and Kim Seon-ho didn't have much screen time, so I didn't really get to know him as an actor.

But at Yang Geum-myeong and Park Chung-seop's wedding in When Life Gives You Tangerines, one smile from Kim Seon-ho made me notice him.

Yes, that's right. He'd shaved off the beard and gotten a proper haircut, and with that warm smile of his, I immediately thought, this actor has something special.

Yes, that's when I decided that smile was Kim Seon-ho's signature. After I watched two more shows where he plays the lead, I was even more sure of it: a warm, gentle smile is Kim Seon-ho's trademark.

In Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha, he plays Chief Hong, a very classic character. He's a jack-of-all-trades, highly educated, and can handle anything that comes up in the seaside village. He always shows up full of energy, warm and cheerful. But he has a very painful past, and he keeps it hidden inside.

In the show, Chief Hong always flashes his signature smile at key moments, warm, gentle, and full of an adorable, playful kind of life.

And in the new show Can This Love Be Translated?, his character Joo Ho-jin is pretty much classic Kim Seon-ho: a warm, gentle person.

I couldn't help wondering why Kim Seon-ho always gets scripts like this, playing someone warm and gentle.

I'm not really someone who likes to dig into actors' real lives, but for this post I did a quick Google search on Kim Seon-ho's background.

It turns out his life hasn't been smooth sailing either. He went through a trauma as a child: robbers broke into his home and stabbed his mother, and the young Kim Seon-ho could only watch. After that he developed a fear of being looked at, and it wasn't until high school, through acting, that he slowly got his confidence back.

"So there are warm, kind eyes in this world too."

Honestly, that's an almost unreal backstory. It looks exactly like a character setup straight out of a K-drama script, but it really happened to Kim Seon-ho.

Maybe that's why Kim Seon-ho is so suited to warm, gentle roles. His past, like so many K-drama scripts, is full of pain. Only someone who has truly gone through pain, then walked out of it on their own and finally learned to meet the world with gentleness, can really have that gentle feeling.

"The world has kissed my soul with its pain, asking for its return in songs."

Maybe that's why Kim Seon-ho's smile always feels so warm and gentle.

At heart, that's a lot like K-dramas themselves. I think K-dramas are a genre that takes ordinary people's real lives seriously. However many ups and downs life brings, after all the hardship, we always get a warm ending.

And I hope you and I can both smile from the heart, the way Kim Seon-ho does.