BtoB's Yook Sung-jae, star of new K-drama The Golden Spoon, says he's 'still a kid' — here are other babyfaced K-stars

Have you ever watched a show and thought that the actors playing high-schoolers probably haven’t touched a textbook in years?

Case in point: These South Korean stars below have babyfaced looks which landed them roles as teenagers.

Yook Sung-jae

Yook Sung-jae plays a high-schooler in the new K-drama The Golden Spoon and it’s not a stretch of the imagination to think he looks the part. 

He has the attitude to boot as well, insisting he’s “still a kid” at the recent press conference for the show, which is his first since completing his military service in November 2021.

The 27-year-old told the regional press last Friday (Sept 23): “When I got discharged from the military, I thought I was all grown up. I like cleaning, I'm serious, I'm all mature.

“But after two months, I realised I didn't really change all that much — I'm still a scallywag, I'm still a prankster, I'm still immature.”

The Golden Spoon follows teenager Lee Seung-cheon (Sung-jae), who comes from an impoverished family, after he swaps bodies with his wealthy friend Hwang Tae-yong (Lee Jong-won) using the titular magic golden spoon. And of course, things don’t go as wonderfully as he hopes. 

Coincidentally, actor Choi Won-young plays Sung-jae’s dad again, after doing so in Mystic Pop-up Bar, which was Sung-jae’s last drama before he enlisted. 

The Golden Spoon, which also stars Jung Chae-yeon and Yeonwoo, airs Fridays and Saturdays, and you can catch it on Disney+ if you’re into cute boys and Freaky Friday scenarios.

[embed]https://youtu.be/dohX1LIOSMw[/embed]

Park Bo-young

[embed]https://www.instagram.com/p/CeSZU5lrab7/[/embed]

Besides Sung-jae, Park Bo-young is also known for her baby face and her petite stature — she’s only 158cm — but the 32-year-old definitely doesn’t stick to cutesy roles. While she played a student in an all-girls’ boarding school in the 2015 movie The Silenced, the horror movie about disappearing schoolgirls is anything but cute.

Two of her upcoming roles see her playing nurses: a psychiatric nurse in K-drama Morning Comes to Psychiatric Wards Too (scheduled to be released in 2023) and a disaster first-responder in movie Concrete Utopia (which began filming in 2021).

Cha Eun-woo

[embed]https://www.instagram.com/p/Cg_jyZAOh7f/?hl=en[/embed]

Cha Eun-woo is another actor who can convincingly play a high-schooler without anyone raising an eyebrow. 

The 25-year-old, who’s also a member of the boy band Astro, has acted in a variety of shows including True Beauty (2020), a high-school drama featuring Moon Ga-yeong as Im Ju-kyung, a girl with an inferiority complex.

Eun-woo plays the handsome classmate with a tragic backstory Lee Su-ho, who had a fallout with his former best friend Han Seo-jun (Hwang In-youp). 

Love triangles and broken friendships — what could be more high school than that?

Hwang In-youp

[embed]https://www.instagram.com/p/CiUWRxlvD34/[/embed]

Hwang In-youp, the other actor who plays high-schooler Han Seo-jun in True Beauty, is actually far older than his co-star Eun-woo.

The 31-year-old began his acting career in 2018 and playing students seems to be his bread and butter: You can also catch In-youp in The Sound of Magic (2022) and 18 Again (2020) as a high school student.

An ‘older’ character he has played is in 2022’s Why Her, where he acts as a law student in university instead.

IU (Lee Ji-eun)

[embed]https://www.instagram.com/p/CiuioV0vnHZ/[/embed]

Though IU, 29, has been a K-pop soloist for 13 years, she also gained acclaim as an actress, particularly in Hotel del Luna — the most-viewed tvN drama of 2019 — and the film Broker, which was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.

Back in 2016 in the drama Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo, her character Go Ha-jin accidentally time-travels during a solar eclipse and she wakes up as a 16-year-old in the historical Goryeo dynasty. 

ALSO READ: Is that Kim Jong-un's daughter? Children of Vincent Zhao, Eric Moo, Sandra Ng and Michael Miu

drimac@asiaone.com