Ju Ji-hoon

There is a moment early in Kingdom (2019) when Crown Prince Chang is handed a bow. Another actor would have taken a breath, found the light and made the shot a declaration. Ju Ji-hoon picks it up and shoots. That is his habit, and it is a good one. He plays authority as a thing you do rather than a thing you announce, and he is at his most convincing when a scene asks for his hands and not his voice.

He arrived as a model, with campaigns for Calvin Klein, Levi's and Reebok from 2003, and his first big part was also a crown prince, Lee Shin in the television drama Princess Hours (2006). The notices then wondered whether there was much behind the face. He worked less after 2009, came back in 2012 and set about answering the question in films: Asura: The City of Madness (2016), the fantasy Along with the Gods (2017–2018), The Spy Gone North (2018) and Dark Figure of Crime (2018), for which he shaved his head and changed the way he walked to play a serial killer. The pattern since is plain. He keeps being cast as royalty, princes and emperors in period and fantasy settings, and keeps taking harder, plainer parts in between.

Kingdom is where the two habits meet. Kim Eun-hee's script gives Chang a court that has kept him useless on purpose and a countryside full of corpses in which he finds he can be of use, and Ju plays the discovery without fuss. He is better in company than alone: Bae Doona's brisk physician and Kim Sang-ho's not-very-brave bodyguard both improve him, because they give him someone to be practical with. We were moved, more than we expected, by a man simply being allowed to be useful; Ju plays it as relief rather than triumph, and it is the least noble and most affecting thing in the series. The fault is the writing's. The second season, directed by Park In-je, hands him almost no failings, and a hero who is never wrong gets dull, however well he draws a bow.

Since then he has moved through Hyena (2020), Jirisan (2021) and Light Shop (2024) to The Trauma Code: Heroes on Call (2025), where he plays a doctor, Baek Kang-hyeok, and the authority for once comes with a job attached. He has said of his work, "If someone asks, 'Was that your best?' I want to be able to answer, 'Yes.'" That is admirable and also a little worrying, because his best so far has come when nobody was watching him try. Someone should write him a prince who is wrong about something. He would be good at it.