ToptapMinlee
The ToptapMinlee pairing has an unusually clean origin: it did not grow out of a reality show, a survival programme or a studio training class, and it did not inherit an audience from a previous partnership. It begins with a single casting sheet. Payback, the Thai adaptation of the Korean webtoon by samK, needed two leads, and Aplan International Group filled both roles from inside its own house. The agency is simultaneously one of the series’ co-production companies, alongside Raize Up Production, Kidari Studio and Copus Japan. Toptap and Min were not paired and then given a project; they were given a project and became a pairing because of it.
What each brought to it was almost opposite. Min Thanakorn Wichanukhor, credited internationally as Minlee, arrived with years of idol training behind him. Born in Chiang Mai on 15 March 2000, he competed on two Korean survival programmes: Under Nineteen, where he was eliminated in episode 12 in 33rd place, and Boys Planet, which he entered as a WakeOne Entertainment trainee before being eliminated in episode 5 in 59th place. Those years account for his Korean and Chinese fluency and for the b-boying, acrobatics and choreography he is known for. He signed with Aplan International on 28 May 2024 and belongs to the group A:SIDE.
Toptap Jarukit Kaewmoonrueang came the other way entirely. He was born in the same province as his co-star, Chiang Mai, three and a half years later, on 2 October 2003, and he entered the industry through pageantry rather than performance training, taking the Mister Looker Thailand 2022 title while studying at Rajamangala University of Technology Lanna. His only prior stage credit was the theatre project The House of Mirrors. Payback is his first screen role of any kind, and it is a lead. Very few Thai BL pairings launch with one member making his television debut in the same episode that establishes the ship.
Payback premiered on 30 May 2026 and ran ten episodes on ONE 31, Saturdays at 22:30 ICT, closing on 1 August 2026, with streaming on iQIYI, the OneD app, Rakuten TV, Heavenly and LINE TV. Min plays Theemekha “Sun” Rungsapdee, a loan shark’s debt collector who loses his younger brother to a debtor’s knife and his savings to his own boyfriend, and who resurfaces five years later as a delivery rider with a plan. Toptap plays Athip “Jay” Wanitsakitphaisan, the entertainment agency’s managing director, deliberately absent from the company’s published org chart, whose attention to Sun turns out to be neither professional nor accidental.
The pairing name itself is press and fan usage rather than an agency product. Boys Love Insider ran its feature on the duo under the ToptapMinlee spelling, Thai Update used the same form, and it is the version carried by the fan pages and the English-language interview channels that followed the series. Neither Aplan International nor the production has registered it as an official brand. Both men also appear as regular members of Payback Behind the Scenes, the companion programme released alongside the series.
ToptapMinlee is built on asymmetry rather than symmetry, and the series uses it deliberately. Min Thanakorn Wichanukhor, born 15 March 2000 and listed at 178 cm, carries years of Korean idol training in his body, b-boying, acrobatics, choreography, and Boys Love Insider characterised his contribution as physical and performance-based energy. Toptap Jarukit Kaewmoonrueang, born 2 October 2003, has no such training and no prior screen credit at all; the same feature described him as a newer, quieter, more mysterious presence. The result, in that publication's reading, is that the two do not produce an obvious soft pairing so much as a tension that still needs to grow. Payback's writing rewards exactly that gap: Min's Sun is all forward motion and suppressed grief, a man who has spent five years converting loss into a plan, while Toptap's Jay is stillness and withheld information, an executive whose name is kept off his own company's org chart. Both men are from Chiang Mai and both are signed to Aplan International, which is also a co-producer of the series, so the pairing is an in-house construction from the start. No height figure has been published for Toptap, so no comparison is offered here.
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