Park Min-young – Biography, Age, Korean Dramas & Movies

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Rom-Com · Leading Lady

박민영

Park Min‑young

KDW Fan Rating

Editorial scoring by KDW — not an objective metric.

Acting Skill84

Charisma88

Versatility82

Popularity90

Career Balance

Supporting (5)(20) Lead

Age40 years 5 months 29 days

NationalitySouth Korean

AgencyHook Entertainment (signed December 30, 2021)…

Debut2006

🏆Award
Winning

24Dramas

2Films

KDRAMAWORLDS.COM

🕊️ Who Is Park Min-young?

In Siren’s Kiss (2026), Park Min-young plays Han Seol-ah, a senior art auctioneer who becomes the prime suspect in a string of deaths connected to her former lovers — a role she prepared for by lowering her vocal register and, by her own account, refusing to smile for most of the shoot. It’s a deliberate departure from the persona that made her famous: reviewers singled out the performance as one of the most nuanced of her career, precisely because it required her to strip away the warmth that had defined nearly two decades of work.

That warmth is still the reason most audiences know her at all. Park has spent close to twenty years earning the nickname “Queen of Romantic Comedies” — a title built one role at a time, from the cross-dressing scholar of Sungkyunkwan Scandal (2010) to the unflappable Secretary Kim (2018) to Kang Ji-won, the wronged wife who rewrites her own fate in Marry My Husband (2024). Siren’s Kiss doesn’t retire that reputation so much as complicate it — proof that an actress this identified with a single genre still has other things she can do.

📋 Quick Profile

🚀 Career Timeline

Biography

👶 Early Life

Park Min-young was born in Seoul on March 4, 1986. During her teenage years she spent roughly three years abroad as an exchange student in Pennsylvania — an experience that later made her one of the more fluently English-speaking actresses of her generation, well before international press became a fixture of the K-drama publicity cycle. She returned home to finish high school and prepare for the college entrance exam, eventually enrolling at Dongguk University to study theatre.

She has also been unusually candid about a part of her appearance most actresses in the industry don’t discuss on the record. In a 2010 interview, not long after Sungkyunkwan Scandal made her a household name, she confirmed she’d had rhinoplasty to correct a crooked bone in her nose — something she’d been teased about in school — and said she saw no reason to hide it. It’s a small detail, but one she’s continued to bring up herself in later interviews rather than let tabloids speculate on it.

🎤 Career Beginnings

Park’s start in entertainment came through a 2005 SK Telecom commercial, and her first acting credit followed a year later with a supporting role in the ensemble sitcom High Kick! (2006). It took a few more years of smaller parts — a guest spot in the long-running anthology series Hometown of Legends, a second-female-lead turn in the historical drama Ja Myung Go — before recognition caught up with the work; her performance in the 2007 series I Am Sam earned her a Best New Actress win at the KBS Drama Awards, the first real marker that casting directors were starting to notice her.

The real turning point came in 2010, with Sungkyunkwan Scandal. Playing Kim Yoon-hee, a young woman who disguises herself as a man to study at Joseon Korea’s most prestigious academy, required a tightrope act — too soft in the performance and the disguise wouldn’t hold up, too rigid and the character would collapse into gimmick. She pulled it off well enough to be nominated for a Baeksang Arts Award, still the single most prestigious acting honor in Korean television, at just 24 years old. She followed it almost immediately with City Hunter (2011), an action-romance opposite Lee Min-ho that became just as big a hit — the two actors dated briefly after filming wrapped, a relationship both agencies later confirmed and which ended amicably within a few months.

🎭 Acting Style

Critics and fans alike tend to describe Park’s screen presence in similar terms — lovely, doe-eyed, effortlessly warm — but the roles behind that reputation cover more ground than the shorthand suggests. She’s played a cross-dressing Joseon scholar, a traumatized webtoon artist opposite a vigilante hacker in Healer, an unflappable corporate secretary, and a murdered wife rewriting her own fate in a fantasy-revenge melodrama, and made each of them feel like a distinct person rather than a variation on the same rom-com lead. Tatler Asia, looking back at her career, credited Sungkyunkwan Scandal specifically as the performance that recalibrated the industry’s expectations of her — proof she could carry narrative weight without spectacle.

Siren’s Kiss (2026) tested that range in the opposite direction. To play Han Seol-ah, an art auctioneer suspected in a string of deaths connected to her former lovers, Park reportedly lowered her vocal register and avoided smiling for most of the shoot — a conscious break from the warmth that had defined nearly every role before it. Reviewers called it one of the most nuanced performances of her career, and the compliment lands harder for how deliberately unfamiliar it is: an actress two decades into a career built on being liked, choosing a part that asks the audience to distrust her instead.

✨ Legacy

By the time Marry My Husband streamed globally on Netflix in 2024, Park had been working steadily for close to two decades — long enough that a wave of younger actresses had grown up watching her before ever sharing a set with her. The “Queen of Romantic Comedies” nickname wasn’t handed to her for one role; it accumulated across Sungkyunkwan Scandal, City Hunter, Healer, What’s Wrong with Secretary Kim, and Her Private Life, a run few actresses of her generation have matched for sheer consistency. Her reach extended well past Korea, too: Healer built her a substantial following in China years before Chinese streaming platforms were fixtures of the K-drama conversation, and iQiYi Taiwan later named her its Most Beautiful Award recipient off the strength of Secretary Kim’s regional popularity.

Marry My Husband arrived, by her own description, after a difficult stretch — one that included a widely reported 2022 controversy her agency later clarified she had no direct involvement in, beyond being called as a witness. The show’s Kang Ji-won, a woman murdered by the people closest to her who gets a second chance to rewrite her own story, doubled as an unusually literal comeback vehicle, and the industry treated it that way: the Daesang for Best Actress of the Year at the 2024 Asia Artist Awards was the biggest individual honor of her career. Two years later, Siren’s Kiss suggested the comeback wasn’t a one-off — just the start of an actress now in her forties still willing to reinvent what she’s known for.

🌟 Notable Works & Iconic Roles

Sungkyunkwan Scandal (2010)

City Hunter (2011)

Healer (2014)

Queen for Seven Days (2017)

What’s Wrong with Secretary Kim (2018)

Her Private Life (2019)

When the Weather Is Fine (2020)

Marry My Husband (2024)

Sungkyunkwan Scandal (2010)

City Hunter (2011)

Healer (2014)

Queen for Seven Days (2017)

What’s Wrong with Secretary Kim (2018)

Her Private Life (2019)

When the Weather Is Fine (2020)

Marry My Husband (2024)

🎞️ Filmography

🎖️ Awards & Honors

🆕 Recent & Upcoming Projects

Park closed out a very full stretch of work with Siren’s Kiss (March–April 2026), a tvN noir romantic-thriller that also streamed internationally on Amazon Prime Video and gave her, by multiple accounts, the most demanding role of her recent career — an art auctioneer whose former lovers keep turning up dead. Ahead of her is a swing back toward familiar territory: Nine to Six, an SBS weekly drama also set for a Netflix run in the second half of 2026, casts her as Kang Yi-ji, a workaholic deputy legal team head at an auto company who has to reconsider her cynicism about love and marriage after a chance encounter with a younger intern. The project is a remake of the Chinese drama The Rational Life, and marks a return to the rom-com register that made her a star in the first place — just months removed from the show that proved she could do without it entirely.

🤝 Brand Ambassador

💖 Personal Life

Park has no publicly confirmed relationship as of 2026. Her only officially acknowledged past relationship was with actor Lee Min-ho, whom she dated for several months in 2011 and 2012 after meeting on the set of City Hunter; both agencies confirmed the relationship and the eventual breakup, citing busy schedules.

RUMOR · September 2022In September 2022, Dispatch reported that she was dating a businessman who was later connected to a separate investigation; her agency, Hook Entertainment, stated in February 2023 that she had no involvement in that case beyond having been called as a witness.

She has made repeated large charitable donations in recent years, including roughly ₩100 million (about $76,000) to wildfire relief efforts in March 2022 and a similar amount to a cancer treatment center in February 2024.

🎈 Fun Facts

• She spent about three years as a teenage exchange student in Pennsylvania, which is part of why she’s one of the more fluently English-speaking actresses of her generation.
• In a 2010 interview, she openly discussed having had rhinoplasty to correct a crooked nose bone after being teased about it in school, saying she preferred honesty to letting rumors spread.
• Her English name is Rachel.
• She appeared in the music video for Big Bang’s “Haru Haru” (2008), playing G-Dragon’s love interest.
• She held her first-ever solo fan meeting, titled “My Day,” in October 2018 — twelve years after her acting debut.
• Two Chinese dramas she filmed around 2015–2016, Castle in the Time and Braveness of the Ming, didn’t actually air until 2023 and 2024 — a gap widely attributed to the years-long freeze on Korean-Chinese entertainment collaboration that followed the 2016 THAAD dispute.
• Her nickname, “Queen of Romantic Comedies,” shows up often enough in Korean entertainment coverage that it gets referenced in headlines about her casting decisions even outside the genre.

💬 Quotes

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