Lee Dong-wook Gained 8kg for ‘A Shop for Killers’ Season 2 – Then Had to Lose It All Almost Immediately

By the time A Shop for Killers Season 2 premiered on Disney+ and Hulu on July 22, the seven to eight kilograms Lee Dong-wook had spent months building onto his frame were already gone. He shed them within weeks of wrapping, for an entirely different role in an entirely different production. The body an actor builds for a character, it turns out, doesn’t get to stay his.

The season’s first two episodes streamed together on premiere day, with episodes three and four following just this week, on July 29, and the final pair set for August 12. Lee returns as Jeong Jin-man, the reclusive former mercenary who runs a black-market weapons shop for assassins while shielding his niece, Ji-an (Kim Hye-jun), from the hired guns closing in on them — the same dark, stylish premise that made A Shop for Killers Season 1 a hit on the platform two years ago. Season 2 also widens the cast, adding Japanese actors Hyunri and Masaki Okada to Ji-an’s field team, part of a bigger, more international push for the franchise.

To play Jin-man, Lee gained roughly seven to eight kilograms, going from his usual 74-75 kilograms up to about 82. “I ate four to five meals a day, mostly protein,” he told The Korea Times. “It’s not really eating, it’s just putting food in my mouth.” He also cut out alcohol for the five to six months of prep and filming.

The extra size wasn’t for spectacle. Jin-man has spent years living as a mercenary and hired gun, and Lee wanted a physical presence that carried that history. He also drank more water than usual during filming, he said — a deliberate attempt to soften the visible signs of aging across the two-year gap separating the seasons, a small detail that says as much about how closely an actor tracks his own face on screen as it does about the role.

Then, almost as soon as Season 2 wrapped, he lost the weight again — this time for The Facade of Love, a separate project opposite Jung Yu-mi and Jeon So-nee in which he plays a civil servant, a role Jin-man’s bulk wouldn’t have suited. “It’s not as easy as it used to be to gain and lose weight,” he admitted. By his own account, this kind of cycle has become close to routine for him across physically demanding roles — which makes the admission that it’s getting harder each time land differently than a one-off complaint.

Lee said he was nervous returning to the role after a two-year break. “I’m not usually the type to worry, but I was nervous,” he said, though that faded the moment he saw the cast again: “It felt like I’d seen them just yesterday.” He’s also dropped one habit from the first season — he used to say the line “Listen carefully, Jung Ji-an” constantly; in Season 2, he says it barely comes up anymore.

On his co-star: “She’s not an actress I would dare to evaluate,” he said of Kim Hye-jun. “She’s an incredible actress.”

He’s described the new season as more of a continuation than a reinvention. “I didn’t think Season 2 had to be completely different,” he told The Korea Times. “It’s an extension of Season 1.” He’s also hinted the character goes further this time — “a level of brutality that goes beyond the previous season” — and said he hopes the franchise becomes something of a genre benchmark: “It has a really good worldview. I hope it becomes a kind of benchmark for the action genre.”

So far, the numbers back that ambition up. Season 2 became the most-watched Korean Disney+ original worldwide on its release day, topped the platform’s TV charts in South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, and ranked as the most-watched Korean title across the Asia-Pacific region. Its first two episodes opened to IMDb scores above 9.0. For a franchise built around one actor’s willingness to keep rebuilding his body for it, that kind of reception is the strongest argument for asking him to do it again.

Against that backdrop, Lee’s comments on a possible Season 3 read less like deflection and more like real uncertainty. “I haven’t heard anything at all about Season 3,” he said, though he’s indicated he’d return if it happens — and joked that, if Season 2 draws enough love, a third season could still be another two years out.

None of this is unfamiliar territory for Lee, who’s spent years moving between roles few actors attempt twice — the doomed immortal of Goblin, the fox spirit across Tale of the Nine-Tailed and its 1938 sequel, the unraveling detective of Bad and Crazy. A Shop for Killers, and now its physically punishing second season, is simply the most literal version of a pattern he’s built a career on: disappearing into a part completely enough that undoing it afterward becomes its own kind of work.

Whether that work earns a third season isn’t really up to him. It’s sitting with however many people keep watching over the next few weeks.

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