ToptapMinlee
The ToptapMinlee pairing 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 also one of the series’ co-production companies, alongside Raize Up Production, Kidari Studio and Copus Japan. Toptap and Min 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. 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. He was born in Chiang Mai on 2 October 2003, and he entered the industry through pageantry, taking the Mister Looker Thailand 2022 title while studying at Rajamangala University of Technology Lanna. His only earlier stage credit was the theatre project The House of Mirrors. Payback is his first screen role, and it is a lead.
Aplan International Group is both the agency of the two leads and a co-producer of the series that launched them.
Payback runs ten episodes of about 43 minutes, roughly seven hours of screen time.
Its genres run through thriller, suspense, action, crime and melodrama before they reach romance.
ToptapMinlee is built on asymmetry, and the series uses it deliberately. Min's years of Korean idol training show in a physical, performance-based energy, while Toptap arrives with a quieter, more withheld presence. Payback's writing rewards 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.
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