Song Kang
Song Kang is an actor, born 1994.
Song was a model before he was an actor, and the early television work barely registers: a delivery man in Touch Your Heart, a young musician in The Liar and His Lover, a supporting turn in Man Who Sets The Table. Born in Suwon in 1994, he was a face looking for a format.
Netflix supplied it. Love Alarm in 2019 gave him Hwang Sun-oh, the sullen rich boy in a high-school romance built around an app that tells you who likes you, and the platform kept going: Sweet Home in 2020, Nevertheless in 2021, Forecasting Love and Weather in 2022, My Demon in 2023. The nickname that followed, Son of Netflix, is a joke about volume, but it is also an accurate description of how his career was assembled.
He is best used cold. Cha Hyun-su in Sweet Home is a withdrawn teenager trapped in an apartment block during a monster outbreak, and the performance works because Song plays the withdrawal as a settled fact rather than as tragedy waiting to be resolved. The romances ask him for warmth and get something more ambivalent; Park Jae-eon in Nevertheless is charming and evasive in equal measure, which is precisely what that story needs and precisely why it annoyed a lot of viewers.
Navillera in 2021 is the outlier and the best argument for him: a young ballet dancer opposite a seventy-year-old man determined to learn, with no charm available to hide behind. Escape in 2024 moved him into film.
Movies (2)
TV (13)
- Sweet Home (2020)
- Four Hands, Two Sonatas (2026)
- My Demon (2023)
- Touch Your Heart (2019)
- Forecasting Love and Weather (2022)
- Love Alarm (2019)
- Nevertheless, (2021)
- I-LAND (2020)
- When the Devil Calls Your Name (2019)
- Man Who Sets The Table (2017)
- The Liar and His Lover (2017)
- Village Survival, the Eight (2018)
- Navillera (2021)
Where to start with Song Kang
Almost nobody starts at Navillera, and almost everybody should. It is a quiet, unglamorous show about two people who need the same thing at opposite ends of a life, and it asks Song for something none of the romances do.
After that, Sweet Home is the obvious big swing: creature horror in a collapsing tower block, uneven but genuinely ambitious, and his best-known role by a distance. Love Alarm is where the fame started and is the slightest thing here. Nevertheless, is worth it if you want a romance with a genuinely unlikeable centre; Forecasting Love and Weather if you want the opposite, adults being sensible at a weather agency. My Demon is the glossiest of the lot, and Escape is the film to see whether the screen career takes.