Oh Woo-ri

Oh Woo-ri (Korean: 오우리; born 6 August 1996) is a South Korean actor and film director. She graduated from Soongsil University with a major in Film Arts, and she is one of the few performers in this vertical with two separate verified credits in Korean girls’ love: Sim Da-ae in The Dream Songs (너와 나, 2023) and Choi Gyeong in Friendly Rivalry (선의의 경쟁, 2025).

Her career was built in Korean independent film rather than on television, and the volume is unusual. Between 2017 and 2020 she appeared in roughly a dozen independent shorts and features, including Young People in Korea: Convenience Store (2017), Alleyway (2017), Kim Hee-sun (2018), Woori (2018), Bench Time (2019), Jazzy Misfits (2020) and Family Photo (2020). She kept working at that pace through the early 2020s with We Came From the Hill (2022), Closed World and Its Friends (2022), Extreme Festival (2023), Hail to Hell (2023), Eunwoo (2023) and others.

2023 is her breakout year on two fronts at once. In film she played Sim Da-ae in The Dream Songs, a story of two high school girls set against the shadow of the Sewol ferry disaster, which is recorded as a girls’ love title. In television she moved into mainstream drama with One Day Off (Wavve) and Welcome to Samdal-ri (JTBC), where she played the young Bu Mi-ja.

Her television work since has been steady and spread across every major Korean platform: A Killer Paradox (Netflix, 2024) as Mi-young, No Way Out: The Roulette (2024), Friendly Rivalry (2025) as Choi Gyeong, Way Back Love (TVING, 2025) as Yoon Tae-kyung, Tangeum (Netflix, 2025), S Line (Wavve, 2025) as Lee Kyung-jin, A Hundred Memories (JTBC, 2025) as Cha Ok-hee and Love: Track (KBS2, 2025) as Kang Sae-ra. When I Sleep (2025) and GOKDU (2026) follow.

She also directs. In 2020 she wrote, directed and edited the short To Hayeon, and directed and edited Can’t Stop! the same year, which is a direct extension of her film-school training rather than a side project.

BLGLFlix editorial view. Korean GL has no equivalent of the Thai studio system, no dedicated production house cycling actors through paired roles, and the usual conclusion drawn from that is that Korea simply makes less of it. Her career suggests a different explanation. Korean queer stories about women have mostly been made in independent film, on small budgets, by directors working outside the broadcast networks, and the actors who carry them are independent film actors first. That is why The Dream Songs exists at all, and it is why an actor can accumulate a dozen credits in that world before a mainstream network casts her. Our own read is that the arrival of Friendly Rivalry on a telco streaming platform in 2025, with a GL premise and a performer who came up through exactly that independent circuit, is the more meaningful signal about where Korean GL is going than any single show’s viewership. The talent pipeline was always there. What changed is who is willing to pay for it.