Fresh off Milan Loves Seoul — this year’s fashion week edition staged in Seoul — the Korean actor opens up about the obsession that’s driven him since Best Mistake, the villain role he’s dying to play, and what meeting the event’s Italian crowd actually meant to him.
Yoon Jun-won wears black almost all the time. He’s always been into fashion, he admits, and when you ask what role it plays in his life, he starts with a proverb: “There’s a saying — ‘The eyes are the window to the soul.’ I think how someone dresses works the same way. It’s another way of showing who you are.” Once he’s done quoting, he gets practical: he goes for loose, comfortable cuts over anything too tight, but still wants something that stands out, nothing too plain. And when it comes to color, he sticks to one lane instead of mixing things up — hence the black, which he says makes him look pretty dark on a day-to-day basis. It’s a small detail that says more about him than it seems to: an actor who, once something catches his interest, dives all the way in — and decided to do the same with his wardrobe.
He recently took part in this season’s episode of Milan Loves Seoul, the event bringing together Italian fashion and Korean pop culture, this time held held in Seoul: starting September 3rd, independent Italian brands and Korean entertainment names met up in the South Korean capital, Yoon Jun-won included.
Thirty-two years old, 182 cm, a law degree from Soongsil University he’s never really put to use: Yoon Jun-won reaches Italian audiences mostly through Netflix and streaming platforms, with a filmography built almost entirely on “good guy” roles. Model students, teachers, doctors. Among his listed specialties: level 4 in the Japanese language proficiency test, and cycling — details, but in line with a profile built on interests kept up with consistency rather than collected for completeness. But ask him to describe himself in three words, as an actor and as a person, and you get an answer that goes way past the standard agency moodboard bio.
“Persistence. Videophiliac. Laughter-addict,” he answers.
I have very clear likes and dislikes. Once something catches my interest, I dive all the way in — and when I’m hooked, I get pretty relentless about it. It’s like nothing else exists in my head.
This same stubbornness, he says, carries over into an almost physical relationship with screens. There’s always something playing for him: movies, dramas, but also anime, documentaries, sports, anything. If he can’t watch something, he admits, it feels like a small kind of torture.
The third word he picks, “laughter-addict,” comes from a belief more thought-out than it sounds like a joke:
I don’t think we laugh because we’re happy — I think laughing is what makes us happy. And I want to take other people there too. Life without laughter is just too rough. Honestly, it’s less about trying to be funny and more that if something funny comes to mind, I have to say it. And when people actually laugh, it makes me twice as happy. Long live laughter!
It’s an obsessiveness he owns without any shame, whether it’s about screens or landing the right joke. And it resurfaces when you ask which character he hasn’t gotten the chance to play yet.
“I’ve mostly played ‘good guy’ roles — model students, high school teachers, doctors, that kind of thing,” he says. “But honestly, I’m a huge fan of villains, and I love playing them too. I’ve always wanted to take on a villain tangled up in some kind of crime. Villains are what give a story its tension, and a really compelling one can be just as magnetic as the lead.”
It’s the same all-in instinct, applied to acting: he doesn’t settle for what’s already worked, he goes looking for the role that pushes him further. For now, that villain stays a stated wish rather than an announced project, but it’s a solid clue as to where Yoon Jun-won wants to take his career next
Before He Was an Actor
Before becoming one of the recognizable faces of recent Korean dramas, Yoon Jun-won debuted as a member of The Man BLK, a group that combined music and acting — a hybrid format that, in the Korean entertainment system, often serves as a launchpad for actors who later go on to walk their own path. Worth noting for anyone following Hallyu from outside Korea: it’s the point where Yoon Jun-won first learned to stand in front of a live audience, with everything that entails compared to working in front of a camera. It’s a different experience from the one most of his peers have, having come to acting through an academy or a direct audition: before he even learned to build a character in front of a camera, he had to learn to hold the attention of an audience watching him live, in real time, with no chance of a retake.
“It was such a fascinating experience,” he recalls. “I’d always been focused purely on acting, so this was a totally different kind of challenge — brief, but genuinely meaningful. Being part of a team was new to me, and connecting with fans through music on stage felt awkward at first, but it was so very thrilling.”
It’s a passage that, read today, explains something more recent. Yoon Jun-won says he tends to feel comfortable on set faster than others, building bonds with the people working on it in a short time. He credits that directly to his time in the group, to having had to learn to be around people and not just behind a script.
The Role That Got Him Recognized on the Street
Italian audiences probably discovered him with Best Mistake and Eccentric Romance, two titles that built his reputation in the romance genre. But ask him which role made him feel like he was “on the right path,” and the answer leaves no room for doubt: Seo Ju-ho, his character in Best Mistake.
“That’s the role that got me recognized on the street for the first time, and I got so many messages of love and support,” he says. “I was going through a lot at the time, so receiving the strength to keep going back then is a memory I still hold onto. It reminds me that nothing gives me more strength than love from my fans.”
It’s not a detail he’s tossing out to be polite to whoever’s reading. It’s the same pattern that comes back, word for word, when you ask him how it feels now, after meeting the Italian crowd: fans aren’t an audience to thank as a formality, they’re the actual source Yoon Jun-won says he draws energy from during the hard stretches of his career.
The Film He’d Recommend to Anyone Who Doesn’t Know Him Yet
With a filmography spanning around twenty titles across dramas, web dramas, and film — from recent releases like Flex x Cop and How to Become a Building Owner in Korea to Netflix’s Glitch — asking Yoon Jun-won to pick just one title to recommend to a first-time viewer is almost cruel. He admits it himself: he’d want to recommend all of them. But if he has to pick an entry point, his answer lands on a film that, he says, shows a lot of different sides of him in a single story: Toxic Parents.
“It’s a film that makes you ask yourself, ‘What does it mean to be a parent? What kind of parent am I, and what kind do I want to be?'” he explains. “I play the teacher of a high schooler who goes missing. An ordinary guy who’s suddenly become a suspect. What happens after, I’ll leave for the film to tell you.”
It’s a choice that steps away from the “good guy” roles he’s most identified with — an ambiguous character, caught somewhere between innocence and suspicion, that hints at the same pull toward gray areas he mentioned talking about villains. He’s not quite the criminal he says he wants to play someday, but he’s already something more complex than the model boyfriend type Korean audiences are used to seeing him as: an ordinary guy under accusation, forced to defend himself against a suspicion that even he, maybe, isn’t sure is unfounded.
An Anticipated Meeting
When the interview was collected, Milan Loves Seoul was still an appointment on the calendar, the occasion that brought Koreami to interview him. Yoon Jun-won had addressed a message directly to whoever would read it here, on Koreami: “To all my fans and Koreami readers in Italy! To me, Italy means incredible fashion and some of the best wine in the world. Getting to connect with such passionate fans from such a wonderful country through Milan Love Seoul is a real honor, and I couldn’t be more excited.”
That meeting is now behind him. This edition of the event was held in Seoul, so it wasn’t Yoon Jun-won who traveled to Italy — it was the other way around: brands, industry people, and Italian fans came to his city for the occasion. The practical outcome, for him, stays the same as what he described in the interview: an Italian crowd met in person, not just through the screen he says he can never quite switch off. There’s something almost circular about it, if nothing else in the coincidence: an actor who says he draws energy above all from direct contact with an audience, caught up in an event built specifically to put that audience and that artist in the same room.
We don’t know yet whether Milan Loves Seoul also brought him some of that Italian wine he’d already put at the top of his list of things he loves about Italy, even from a distance. As for what actually happened during the event — there’s no account of that yet: all that’s left are the words with which Yoon Jun-won looked forward to that appointment, words that can now be read again knowing the meeting genuinely happened.
“I hope we get even closer from here,” he had said before the event. “See you soon!” A goodbye that sounds like the logical consequence of someone who, by his own admission, can’t help himself once something catches his interest.
Essential Filmography
Drama: Flex x Cop (2026, SBS) – Noh Jin-su · How to Become a Building Owner in Korea (2025, tvN) – Yoon Bo-ram · Esquire (2025, JTBC) – Na Dong-su · For Eagle Brothers (2025, KBS) – Han-gyeol · The Manipulated (2024, Disney+) – Suji’s husband · My Dearest Nemesis (2024, tvN) – Nighttime Guy · Eccentric Romance (2023) – Seong-hoon · Serendipity’s Embrace (2023, tvN) – Joseph Oh · Glitch (2022, Netflix) · Cheer Up (2022, SBS) – Returning Student · Crime Puzzle (2021, Seezn) · Best Mistake (2020–2021) – Seo Ju-ho
Film: Project Y (2025) – Jebi 5 · Rhapsody for the Dead (2023) – Detective Kim · The Daechi Scandal (2023) – Detective Joo · Toxic Parents (2023) – Ki-beom
Six roles, in chronological order
From his most recent role back through time. Click a card to see who he played.
