Get to Know Korea's Largest Babygirl
Rowoon is six feet three inches of nontoxic masculinity, and he uses all of it to challenge social conservatism.
Rowoon is a stage name. Kim Seok-woo debuted with it as a teenaged idol trainee and then member of the kpop group SF9. Not just a member — the “lead vocalist and the ‘visual,’” writes culture journalist Taylor Glasby: “a controversial but universal label in K-pop, defined by most as the member who best fits South Korea’s notoriously rigid beauty standards.” Rowoon is sought after by makeup brands, fashion photographers, TV producers and anyone else who want to pay him for being handsome. One of his epithets is “face genius.”
At nearly 30 centimeters taller than the average Korean man in his 20s, Rowoon was always going to stand out. In his dramas, love interests like Park Eun-bin (The King’s Affection), Jo Bo-ah (Destined with You) and Kim Hye-yoon (Extra-ordinary You) seem not even to reach his collarbone. Directors have fretted out loud that casting Rowoon might constrict their options with the rest of the ensemble, since any male rivals would need to look suitably adversarial next to him. His height seems to embarass Rowoon; he’s spoken about feeling “almost monstrous” about it.
This makes his favorite character types all the more remarkable, because Rowoon absolutely loves to play a damsel.
This man truly has it all. He’s guilelessly charming. He’s outrageously fit. His big, expressive eyes could put a Precious Moments figurine to shame. He’s a master of physical comedy. His reputation in the industry is, from what I can gather, one of humility, kindness and earnest curiosity about those around him. He has not yet made a dud in his acting career, for which he left his boyband career last fall. Rowoon could do anything he wants, and what he wants is to be caught as he trips by an opinionated woman who forges her own path. He does not play this as a joke.
I would risk it all
There are so many cheap and easy ways Rowoon could have swanned into stardom. He could have coasted on empty-calorie heartthrob roles or cynical cash-grab productions. Instead, his first leading role was as a nobody — literally, a background character in a high school webtoon who, Galatea-like, only comes to have a face, a personality and a destiny when the heroine of Extra-ordinary You takes an interest in him. From there, Rowoon leapfrogged to a noona romance in which he, a cosmetics company employee, falls in love with and courts an older co-worker. His third leading credit was The King’s Affection, his first period role, as an upright and brilliant young scholar who falls in love with the crown prince.
Cross-dressing is a time-honored trope throughout world literature, as is the (usually male) protagonist who often comes to terms with his surprise queerness in front of us. We spend half the series watching Jung Ji-un notice his own interest in a man, lose his ability to be chill in front of his crush, fantasize about kissing the crown prince and even be rescued on horseback. His confession, though rebuffed in a wrenching effort to keep Ji-un safe from palace intrigue, is heartfelt and straightforward:
“I will believe you if you say the feeling was temporary, but for me, it wasn’t. It wasn’t admiration from a subject. I thought it was my loyalty to you. But it was affection. I have a deep affection for you, Your Royal Highness. Although you’re a man and the Crown Prince of this nation, I love you… I will endure it. Whatever people say… no, whatever you say, I will endure it all.”
This feels like a big deal. Homophobia is a vocal force in South Korean politics right now. “[M]ore than 52% of Koreans [are] opposed to living close to a member of the LGBTQ+ minority,” according to a survey released this spring. “The only group of people less welcome than sexual minorities [is] former convicts.”
Rowoon’s next sageuk, The Matchmakers (my favorite piece of media from all of 2023), was the first historical drama that I’ve seen actually depict queer characters. Almost as headline-generating was his cameo in A Time Called You, in which he successfully breaks his real-life friend Ahn Hyo-seop out of his shell. There’s no gay panic, just ordinary, quiet connection and the hope for something more:
There are plot reasons not to herald these appearances as much as we would like, fair warning, but I appreciate that someone with Rowoon’s clout and endorsement portfolio neither shies away from portraying queerness nor calls himself particularly brave for it. While I make no claims about sexuality and never could, I jokingly refer to him as one of the two most bisexual men in Korea,1 thanks to his effortless chemistry with absolutely everybody. Furthermore, given how chaste most kdramas are, I was delighted to see him do an actually sensual foreplay scene with Jo Bo-ah in Destined With You, which transitions to an unambiguous “yeah, they had sex” naked-in-bed scene the next morning.
Terms and conditions
Kpop has not sucked me in like kdramas have,2 but it makes intuitive sense that the idol industry offers fertile ground for an expansive understanding of sexuality. During an interview in 2019, the other members of SF9 revealed that Rowoon had lots of male fans, including many who cheer at the entrances of venues. “They also come to our fan signing events, and I remember their faces now,” Rowoon added. “You guys! If you don’t do that for me during this comeback, I’ll be sad! I love you!”
Such open and joyous male fans are most likely a minority in South Korea. While Confucian conservatism has always infused Korean society, recent elections are highlighting some catastrophic differences among populations. More than three-quarters of men in their 20s self-report that they oppose feminism. “South Korean men in their 20s express more conservative views than men who are 60 years old or older,” wrote S. Nathan Park in 2021 for Foreign Policy. Young men “see their women peers as threats who (in their misguided view) … receive preferential treatment despite having achieved equality, offending their sense of supposed meritocracy.” The scope and pervasiveness of this hostility can make women afraid to even be seen investigating contrary worldviews.
Despite its hyper-developed status, South Korea ranks globally at or near the bottom in a number of gender-gap measures, particularly in wages. Women already facing onerous expectations regarding their looks, their work, their family duties and their child-bearing schedule recoil from a culture of resentment, exploitation and physical harm among their male peers. The 4B movement is one of several strains of protest among young women in Korea that rejects these social requirements entirely.
Against this backdrop, Rowoon is carrying off a tightrope walk. Hugely profitable industries are never as liberal-minded as they’re accused. Even The King’s Affection runs on the dramatic irony of the beloved crown prince actually being a woman. A lot of contractual obligations are riding on Rowoon’s ability not to be too offensive to the wrong people. He’s also a product — a sweet, silly, sensitive dreamboat to comfort his fans when the people in their lives so bitterly disappoint them. The market for people like the idea of Rowoon may never run out.
Empathy as superpower
As he’s gotten more confident in his acting, Rowoon has taken more parts as unpleasant men. One reason I love The Matchmakers is that Shim Jung-woo is 26 going on 60 — an endless well of rules-lawyering, demands for convenience, officiousness and prissiness. He’s called the most resentful man in Joseon, since his path to high public office, as a prince and a widower, has been cut off. The very sight of couples in love gives him incapacitating chest pains. And yet: he can’t resist frothy erotic novels written for women, inserting himself into these fantasies in more and more participatory ways. It’s a perfect charicature of patriarchal conservatism.
The audience knows that we and widow/matchmaker Jung Sook-deok (a magnificent Cho Yi-hyun) will fall in love with him. Yet Rowoon puts in the work, revealing layer by layer the wounded core of a man who learns to want and to hope again — who gets better. He also delivers some of my favorite “This Man Is Not a Top” realizations in kdramas writ large. The empathy with which the actor treats this character is an enormous pleasure to watch; you can’t help but think it’s also Rowoon’s message to us all, that empathy gets us what we crave far more than aggression.
When it comes to his process, Rowoon considers acting a “battle of persuasion.” Speaking to AnOther Magazine last fall, he reversed an earlier belief, that his characters tend to be facets of himself. “In the real world, Rowoon finds little in common with the men he plays onscreen, and that disconnect works fine for him,” writes Taylor Glasby. “One of Rowoon’s own triumphs … has been in creating a balance between the public and the private, a peaceful, healthy coexistence of persona and person. Sometimes they blur into one simply because they’re fed into by the same source but, equally, that’s part of his evolution, in being able to control and command his many facets.”
“I’m successfully managing to keep Seok-woo at the same time as developing Rowoon,” he tells Glasby. It’s easy to yoke a public figure to entire worlds or fights or concepts. To persuade us that empathy should be self-directed is also a service and an art. ✶
Do you have a favorite idol-turned-actor? Let me know in the comments or on Bluesky. I love recs and growing my teetering to-watch list.
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The Most Famous Boy in China
Early in their professional relationship, The Untamed co-star Xiao Zhan (six years older, but much newer to being an idol) often called Yibo “Lao Wang” — Teacher Wang, who’d been in the entertainment industry since he was 13. Yibo’s longevity in the business speaks to a keen understanding of audience and state demands. The way he navigates masculinity is central to both.
The other is my beloved Lee Soo-hyuk, who will also be appearing in these page at some point down the line.
Have you watched Under the Queen’s Umbrella? I thought it came out before The Matchmakers but I could be remembering wrong. There a whole subplot in there that’s Highly Relevant to something you wrote here but I can’t say anything more, in case you *haven’t* watched it, since saying anything about it will destroy how that subplot is brought about and evolves. It’s just… amazing writing. I cried my eyes out, literally sobbing. It’s just better to go in with a blank slate, without so much as reading a review! I can’t recommend it enough!