Kim Dong-won
BIOGRAPHY
Kim Dong-won (김동원, born 17 October 1998) is a South Korean actor with eight credits across four years, two of them leads in Boys’ Love series three years apart.
He first appears in A Shoulder to Cry On (소년을 위로해줘) in March 2023, the seven-episode adaptation of the manhwa of the same name, which ran across wavve, TVING and watcha. He plays Kwon Min-jung. Later that year he joined the teen drama Snap and Spark (손가락만 까딱하면), an eight-episode series set at an arts high school, produced by Whynot Media with the Korea Creative Content Agency and released from December 2023 into January 2024.
From there his work spreads across the short-form drama business that has grown up around Korean streaming. He appeared in the two-episode Love Psychedelic (러브 사이키델릭) in December 2024, carried by WeTV, Shortime, Lezhin Snack and others, and in the two-episode The Touch (더 터치) on TVING and Lezhin Snack in August 2025. In between he took two film roles: Hojo (호조), a 118-minute musical set during the Japanese occupation and built around a real historical figure, released in March 2025, and Human Electricity Generation (인간발전) later the same month.
His 2026 is the busiest stretch. From 8 May he appeared as himself, as a contestant, on The Scout (더 스카웃: 다시 태어나는 별), the ENA music talent search built around finding performers the industry has overlooked. Thirteen days later, on 21 May, Check In to You (너에게 체크인) premiered, and he plays Yoon Ji-oh in all six episodes. It is a body-swap romantic comedy set in a seaside guesthouse, where a cold executive and a romantic manager are thrown into each other’s lives by an accident, directed and written by Kim Taewook and produced by Matchbox, BEARS MEDIA, Generation Blue Films and STRONGBERRY. The two shows ran concurrently through late May and June.
BLGLFlix editorial view
His name is a trap for cataloguers before it is anything else. Kim Dong-won is a very common Korean name, shared with a footballer and a comedian, and most listings for him are either incomplete or partly somebody else’s. The record above is the eight credits that survive an identity check.
What that record shows is a specific and fairly modern kind of Korean career. He has two BL leads separated by three years, and the space between them is not empty: it is filled with two-episode dramas on Lezhin Snack, Shortime and TVING, an eight-episode teen series part-funded by a government content agency, and two films including a period musical. Korean short-form drama is where a lot of working actors now actually spend their time, and it is close to invisible in English-language reference material because two-episode releases do not get reviewed, ranked or written up. A profile that only counted his full-length BL work would show two jobs in four years. He has been working continuously.
The overlap in 2026 is the detail most worth noticing. The Scout began on ENA on 8 May and Check In to You premiered on 21 May. For roughly a month he was on a national broadcast music competition, as himself, while a BL series he leads was going out weekly. Put that next to his role in Hojo, a musical, and there is a fairly clear implication that he trained in music as well as acting. The implication is where this stops, because no citable source says so directly, and two circumstantial credits are not a biography.
The bigger finding sits behind Check In to You, in one of its production companies. STRONGBERRY has been making Korean BL since Long Time No See in 2017, and TMDB alone lists thirteen of its titles: A First Love Story, Choco Milk Shake, Happy Ending, Blossom Campus, Sweetheart Service, Kiss Kiss Sxx, Check In to You, and five more either unreleased or undated, running to 2026. That is nine continuous years from a single studio, which makes it one of the longest-running dedicated BL producers anywhere on the available record. Following a supporting cast list into a studio history is how that kind of thing surfaces at all; it is invisible from any single title page.
PROFILE DETAILS
- Native Name
- 김동원
- Real Name
- Kim Dong-won (김동원)
- Pronouns
- he/him
- Born
- (Age 27)
- Birthplace
- South Korea
- Gender
- Male
- Western Zodiac
- Libra ♎
- Chinese Zodiac
- Tiger 🐅
- Profession
- Nationality
- Debut
- 2023 — A Shoulder to Cry On (2023)
- Years Active
- 2023-present
- Languages
- Korean
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