Kim Da-mi: The Life Story Behind Korea's Fierce Star
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Fifteen hundred young women wanted the same part. The directors of a new action film watched audition after audition, looking for someone who could seem ordinary in one moment and dangerous in the next. Most of the girls who tried out had more experience than Kim Da-mi. She had only a few small film credits behind her, and almost nobody outside a small circle knew her name. Yet when her turn came, something in her stillness made the room pay attention. She did not push, she did not plead, and she did not try to look impressive. She simply became the girl on the page, a schoolgirl who had forgotten her past and carried a secret she did not understand. The part was hers, and with it came a career that would move, in only a few years, from a dark cinema screen to the brightest living rooms in Korea.
That film was The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion, released in 2018. Kim Da-mi played Koo Ja-yoon, and the performance startled people who had watched Korean cinema for decades. Here was a twenty-three-year-old newcomer holding the whole story together, switching from gentle to frightening without any visible effort, and doing fight scenes that looked both graceful and brutal. Critics used words like astonishing and complete. Audiences went back to see it again, and then they asked each other the same question: who is this girl, and where did she come from? The answer was not a long story of child stardom or a famous family. It was a much quieter story, about a student of performing arts who had learned her craft in classrooms and on tiny film sets, and who had waited for a chance that was big enough to match what she could do.
What followed was just as surprising. Kim Da-mi did not take the easy road after her first hit. She moved to television and played Jo Yi-seo in Itaewon Class, a sharp, funny, fearless young woman who ran a restaurant with more confidence than people twice her age. Then she played Kook Yeon-su in Our Beloved Summer, a proud illustrator who had to face the boy she had once loved and left behind. The two characters could hardly have been more different, and that was the point. Kim Da-mi seemed to enjoy the gap between them. She has since played a profiler chasing a killer, a bus attendant in the 1980s, a friend in a story about a friendship that lasted for years, and a scientist in a film about a flood. Each time, she disappears into the work, and each time, the audience has to remind itself that the same actress is standing in front of them.
A Seoul Girl Who Said Very Little
Kim Da-mi was born in Seoul on 9 April 1995. Seoul in the mid-1990s was already a city of tall buildings, crowded subways, neon signs, and families who worked long hours so their children could study hard and do well. Kim Da-mi grew up inside that pressure, like millions of other children in the capital. School mattered, exams mattered, and the future was something adults talked about with a serious face. Nothing in the public record tells us that her childhood was unusual, and she has never tried to sell a dramatic story about her early years. She keeps her family and her private life out of interviews, and that silence has become part of who she is. People who meet her describe a person who listens more than she talks, and that habit seems to go back a long way.
The one clear choice from her youth is the one that shaped everything after it. She decided to study performing arts at Incheon National University, a serious, practical decision that meant years of classes in voice, movement, and the close reading of characters. University in Korea is not a place where acting students simply wait to be discovered. They rehearse, they are corrected, they perform in front of teachers who have seen hundreds of students come and go, and they learn that talent without discipline fades fast. Kim Da-mi took that training seriously. The work she did there gave her a way of building a character from the inside, starting with what the person wants and fears, rather than starting with how the person should look on camera.
Her teachers would have seen what audiences later saw: a young woman with a strong gaze and a calm face, who could hold a silence on screen without filling it with gestures. That kind of stillness is hard to teach, and it is easy to lose. Many young actors feel they must do something in every second, or the camera will forget them. Kim Da-mi learned the opposite lesson. A pause can say more than a speech. A look held for one second too long can tell the audience that something is wrong, or that something is about to change. That lesson, learned in a classroom far from any film set, became the centre of her style.
Seoul itself taught her something else, too. A big city teaches a young person how to be alone in a crowd, how to watch people without being noticed, and how to notice the small details of how strangers behave when they think nobody is looking. An actor needs exactly that skill. She watched how people in Seoul walked when they were tired, how they argued quietly on the phone, how they smiled when they were trying not to cry. Those small observations later turned up in her performances, in the way Ja-yoon lowered her eyes, or the way Yi-seo tilted her head when she was about to say something cutting. She did not invent those details. She had stored them up for years.
By the time she left university, she was twenty-two, trained, patient, and ready to work. She had no famous connections to lean on, as far as anyone knows, and no long list of credits to show a casting director. What she had was a clear idea of what kind of actress she wanted to be: one whose work would speak first, and whose private life would stay private. That idea has guided her ever since, through every choice she has made about which scripts to accept and which to turn down.
Small Films Nobody Watched
Kim Da-mi began where many Korean actors begin, in films that almost nobody saw. Her first screen work came in 2017, in an omnibus film called 2017 Project With The Same Name, in which she played a woman dealing with a recent break-up. An omnibus film is a collection of short stories by different directors, put together into one feature, and it is a common training ground for new talent. The budgets are small, the shooting days are short, and the audience is tiny. But the work is real. A young actor learns where to stand, how to hit a mark without looking down, how to keep a performance alive across many takes, and how to trust a director she has just met.
The next year, 2018, she appeared in Marionette, a mystery thriller in which she played a high school student. The film did not make her famous, and it was never meant to. It gave her something more useful than fame: a chance to work inside a full-length feature, with a proper crew, a proper schedule, and actors who had been doing the job for years. She could watch how they prepared between takes, how they saved their energy for the moments that mattered, and how they handled a scene that was not working. Those are lessons no classroom can teach, because they only make sense when a real camera is running and real money is being spent.
Independent and low-budget films also teach an actor how to be useful. On a small set, there is no room for a star who needs constant attention. Everyone helps, everyone waits, and everyone does the job in front of them. Kim Da-mi learned to be that kind of colleague. Directors who worked with her in those early years remembered her as prepared, calm, and willing to try a scene in a different way if the first version did not work. That reputation matters in Korea, where directors talk to each other and where a recommendation from one set can open the door to the next.
Money would have been tight in those years, and the future would have looked uncertain. A young actress in Seoul can go to audition after audition and hear nothing for months. She has to keep believing that the work itself is worth doing, even when nobody is watching. Kim Da-mi seems to have believed exactly that. She did not chase quick fame on variety shows or in advertisements. She stayed close to the work, took the small parts that taught her something, and waited for a script that would ask her to do more than she had done before. That script arrived sooner than anyone expected, and it arrived in the form of a girl with no memory and a past full of danger.
One Thousand Five Hundred Girls, One Ja-yoon
The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion was directed by Park Hoon-jung, and it needed a lead actress who could carry a very difficult idea. Koo Ja-yoon looks like an ordinary schoolgirl. She lives quietly, she goes to school, and she cannot remember anything about her life before the age of ten. Then strangers come looking for her, and the audience discovers that she was part of a secret programme, and that she has abilities that make her both valuable and dangerous. The actress playing her had to be believable as a shy teenager and as a fighter, and she had to move between those two sides without any warning. That is a hard thing to ask of any actor, and it is a very hard thing to ask of a newcomer.
About 1,500 people auditioned for the part, according to reports about the casting. Kim Da-mi won it. The number matters, because it tells us how unlikely her rise was. She was not handed the role. She earned it in a room full of rivals, in front of people who had every reason to choose someone safer. Something in her audition convinced Park Hoon-jung that she could hold the centre of the film, and he was right. When the film came out in 2018, audiences watched Ja-yoon change in front of their eyes, from a girl who seemed lost to a young woman who understood exactly what she was, and exactly what she could do.
The fight scenes were a large part of why the film worked. Kim Da-mi had to move fast, take hits, and make the violence look both real and controlled. She trained for the physical side of the role, and the effort shows on screen. Her movements are clean and economical, with no wasted energy, and that economy matches her acting style. She does not flail or overdo a moment. She does the smallest thing that will make the scene true, and then she stops. That restraint makes the sudden bursts of power feel shocking, because the audience has been lulled by her calm.
The praise came quickly. She won newcomer honours at several ceremonies, including the Best New Actress prize at the Blue Dragon Film Awards, one of the most respected film honours in Korea. She was also recognised at the Grand Bell Awards, the Buil Film Awards, and other ceremonies, and she picked up a rising-star prize at a film festival in London. For a twenty-three-year-old in her first leading film role, that is an extraordinary list. It also created a problem that every young star faces: what do you do next, when your first big step has already taken you so far? Kim Da-mi answered that question by doing something unexpected. She did not rush into another action film. She went to television, and she chose a character who fought with words instead of fists.
A Restaurant Manager Who Ran the Room
In 2020, Kim Da-mi made her first television drama, Itaewon Class, on JTBC, and the change of medium showed a different side of her talent. The drama was based on a popular webtoon, and it told the story of Park Sae-ro-yi, played by Park Seo-joon, a young man who opens a small restaurant in Itaewon after years of hardship and prison, and who refuses to give up on his dream. Kim Da-mi played Jo Yi-seo, a brilliant and outspoken young woman who becomes the manager of that restaurant. Yi-seo is clever, blunt, and completely sure of herself, and she is also young enough to make mistakes that cost the people around her. It is a loud, funny, fast-talking part, and it could hardly be further from the silent Ja-yoon.
Yi-seo works because Kim Da-mi lets her be unlikeable in the right places. She is rude to customers, she schemes to beat rivals, and she says exactly what she thinks, even when it hurts. But the audience can see the loyalty underneath. Yi-seo believes in Sae-ro-yi and in the restaurant, and she works harder than anyone else to make it succeed. That mix of sharpness and loyalty is what made viewers love her, and it is what made the drama feel alive. A restaurant is a good place for a drama, because it is full of noise, heat, tired staff, and customers who are never satisfied, and Yi-seo stands in the middle of all of it like a person who was born to be in charge.
The drama was a major hit, in Korea and abroad, and it changed how the industry saw Kim Da-mi. She was no longer only the girl from the action film. She was a television lead who could carry a long series, episode after episode, and who could make a weekly audience come back for more. Her work in the drama won her the television newcomer prize at the Baeksang Arts Awards in 2020, one of the highest honours in Korean entertainment. That award matters because Baeksang covers both film and television, and because it is voted on by people who watch a great deal of drama. Winning it for her very first television role told the industry that her film success had not been a one-time accident.
There was another lesson in Itaewon Class, too. A long drama is a marathon, not a sprint. A film is shot in a few months, but a drama can run for sixteen episodes, with long days, late nights, and scripts that arrive while the cameras are already waiting. An actor has to keep a character steady across all of that, even when she is tired, even when a scene is rewritten at the last minute. Kim Da-mi did that, and she did it while playing a character who is almost always moving, talking, and making decisions. It was proof that her quiet style could survive inside a noisy, fast-moving story.
Two People Who Had Already Said Goodbye
Her next drama, Our Beloved Summer, which began in December 2021 on SBS, asked her to do something quieter and sadder. She played Kook Yeon-su, a documentary illustrator who had once been in a school relationship with Choi Ung, played by Choi Woo-shik, and who had broken up with him years earlier. The two had filmed a documentary together as teenagers, and now, as adults, they are forced to work together again, and the old feelings come back whether they want them or not. It is a story about pride, about the things people say when they are young and afraid, and about how hard it is to admit that you were wrong.
The casting had a special meaning for viewers who knew Korean film, because Choi Woo-shik had also been in The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion, as a strange and dangerous young man who hunted Ja-yoon. In Our Beloved Summer, the two of them played something completely different: two ordinary people who had hurt each other and who had to learn how to talk again. Kim Da-mi played Yeon-su as a woman who holds herself together with rules and work, and who is frightened of needing anyone. Her face in the drama is often guarded, but the guard slips in small moments, in a glance, in a pause before she answers, in the way she looks at a drawing she made years ago. Those small slips are where the acting lives.
The drama was loved for its gentle tone and its honest look at young adult life. It did not rely on big twists or villains. It relied on the feeling of sitting in a room with someone you once loved and not knowing what to say. Kim Da-mi and Choi Woo-shik made that feeling real, and their work together won praise from viewers in Korea and in many other countries, where the drama found a large audience on streaming. She also won a director’s prize at the SBS Drama Awards for the role, a sign that the people who make television respected the care she put into it.
Our Beloved Summer also showed how much Kim Da-mi had grown since The Witch. In 2018, she had played a girl who did not know who she was. In 2021, she played a woman who knew exactly who she was, and who was afraid that the person she was might not be enough. That is a harder part to play, because there is no action to hide behind and no mystery to keep the audience guessing. The audience simply watches a person try to be honest, and either believes her or does not. Viewers believed her, and that belief is the best review an actor can get.
A Friend, a Flood, and a Change of Home
Between her big dramas, Kim Da-mi kept returning to film, and she kept choosing stories about people rather than about spectacle. In 2023, she starred in Soulmate, playing Ahn Mi-so, a young woman whose friendship with another woman lasts across many years, through love, distance, and change. The film is soft and slow, and it asks its actors to show how a friendship bends without breaking. Kim Da-mi played Mi-so with a warmth that her earlier roles had only hinted at, and the film reminded audiences that she could be tender as well as fierce. Friendship is a hard thing to act, because it lives in small gestures, in the way two people laugh at a joke nobody else understands, and Kim Da-mi found those gestures without making them look rehearsed.
She also made a brief return to the world of The Witch, appearing in a special appearance in The Witch: Part 2. The Other One in 2022, a reminder to audiences of where she had started. Then, in 2025, she took on two very different television projects. In Nine Puzzles, a mystery crime thriller on Disney+, she played Yoon E-na, a criminal profiler for the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency, working alongside Son Suk-ku. A profiler is a person who tries to understand how a criminal thinks, and the role asked Kim Da-mi to play a woman who is clever, observant, and calm under pressure, but who is also carrying her own doubts. The series gave her a chance to work in a darker, more adult story, and to show that she could lead a thriller without any action-hero tricks.
In the same year, she led A Hundred Memories, a JTBC coming-of-age romance set in the 1980s, playing Go Young-rye, a bus attendant. The 1980s in Korea were a time of buses, radios, handwritten letters, and first loves that felt enormous, and the drama used all of that to tell a story about friendship and youth. Playing a bus attendant meant playing a working young woman, someone whose days were full of standing, smiling, collecting fares, and watching the city go past the window. It was a long way from a profiler, and a long way from a restaurant manager, and that distance is the point. Kim Da-mi seems to choose her roles by asking how different the next person can be from the last one.
Her film work in the same period included The Great Flood, a Netflix film from 2025 in which she played Gu An-na, also described as Dr. Anna, alongside Park Hae-soo. A flood film is a story about survival, about what people do when the water rises and the normal rules stop working, and it asked her to play a scientist under extreme pressure. Behind the camera, her working life also changed. In May 2022, she decided not to renew her contract with her agency ANDMARQ, and in August of that year she signed with United Artists Agency, a company that also represents many well-known Korean actors. A change of agency is a business decision, but it is also a statement about where an actor wants to go next, and Kim Da-mi’s move showed that she was thinking about the long term.
The Quiet After the Noise
Kim Da-mi is now one of the most respected young actresses in Korea, and yet she remains one of the least known in her private life. She does not fill social media with daily updates, she does not talk about her family in interviews, and she does not explain herself to the public. That privacy is unusual in an industry where many stars are expected to share everything, and it is a large part of why audiences trust her on screen. When she plays a character, there is no noise from her real life getting in the way. The audience sees only the person in the story, and that is exactly what a good actor wants.
Her choices since 2018 tell a clear story of their own. She has not repeated herself. She has not taken the same kind of role twice, even when the same kind of role would have been safe and well paid. She has moved between film and television, between action and romance, between the present day and the 1980s, between a profiler and a bus attendant. Each move has asked her to learn something new, and each move has shown the audience a new part of her. That is a slow way to build a career, and it is a brave way, because it means that every new project is a risk. But it is also the way to build a career that lasts, because it is built on skill rather than on one lucky hit.
People who write about Korean acting often point to her eyes, and they are right to do so, but the eyes are only part of it. The real skill is in the stillness behind the eyes, in the patience to let a scene breathe, and in the discipline to do less when other actors would do more. That skill was there in her university training, it was there in the small films nobody watched, and it was there in the audition room where 1,500 girls wanted the same part. It is still there now, in every new role she takes. Kim Da-mi does not shout for attention. She waits, she watches, and when the moment comes, she does exactly what the story needs. That is why directors keep calling her, and why audiences keep remembering her long after the credits have finished.
My Take:
I keep coming back to the number 1,500. I think about a room, or a series of rooms, full of young women who all wanted the same part, and I think about what it must have felt like to be Kim Da-mi walking into that room with almost nothing behind her. She had no hit to point to, no famous name to protect her, and no reason for anyone to remember her face. She had training, she had patience, and she had a way of standing still that made people look twice. I find that image moving, because most of us have been in a version of that room. We have applied for a job we were not sure we could get, or tried out for something while better-known people waited beside us, or walked into a place where nobody knew our name and hoped that the work itself would speak. Kim Da-mi did not win that part by being louder than everyone else. She won it by being truer than everyone else, and that is a lesson I want to hold on to.
What I admire most about her is not the awards, although the awards are real and she earned them. What I admire is the refusal to repeat herself. After The Witch, she could have spent ten years playing dangerous girls with secret powers, and the money would have been good, and the audience would have accepted it. Many actors do exactly that, and I do not blame them, because a safe career is a tempting thing. But Kim Da-mi walked away from the safe career and into a restaurant in Itaewon, and then into a quiet romance about two people who had already broken up, and then into a story about a friendship that lasted for years. Each time, she asked the audience to forget what they thought they knew about her, and each time, she trusted them to follow her. That trust goes both ways, and I think it is the reason her fans stay loyal. They know she will not give them the same thing twice, and they know that the next thing will be worth waiting for.
I also think about her silence, and I want to be honest about how I feel about it. In a world where famous people are expected to share their breakfast, their family, their opinions, and their feelings every single day, Kim Da-mi shares almost nothing, and at first I wondered whether that was cold. The more I thought about it, the more I understood it as a kind of respect. She is telling the audience that the work is the meeting place, and that the rest of her life belongs to her. I think that is a healthy thing, and I think it is a brave thing, because the industry rewards people who give everything away, and it punishes people who hold something back. She holds something back anyway, and her career has not suffered for it. If anything, the silence makes the work stronger, because when she appears on screen, there is no gossip in the way. There is only the character, and the story, and the audience.
There is a part of her story that makes me sad, too, and it is the part about the small films nobody watched. I think about those years, about the auditions that led nowhere, about the sets where the budget was small and the audience was smaller, and about how easy it would have been to give up. She was twenty-two, trained, talented, and invisible, and nobody could have promised her that the big part was coming. Most people in that position do give up, or they change their plans, or they take a different kind of work that pays the rent and slowly pulls them away from what they loved. Kim Da-mi did not do that. She stayed close to the work, she took the small parts, and she kept learning. I do not think that is only a story about acting. I think it is a story about any hard thing that takes years, about studying for an exam nobody sees you studying for, about practising a skill while nobody is watching, about believing that the effort matters even when there is no applause.
When I watch her in my mind, in the roles I have read about and seen described, I notice the same quality again and again: she does less, and it means more. Yi-seo could have been played as a shouting, angry young woman, and many actors would have played her that way. Kim Da-mi played her as a person who is sharp because she is scared of being ignored, and that is a much more interesting choice. Yeon-su could have been played as a cold woman who does not care, and many actors would have played her that way. Kim Da-mi played her as a woman who cares too much and is afraid of what caring will cost her, and that is a much more honest choice. I think the lesson there is about restraint, and it applies far beyond acting. In an argument, in a job, in a family, the person who does the least and means the most is often the person who is listened to. Shouting is easy. Stillness is hard, and it takes practice.
I also want to say something about the way she moved between film and television, because I think it shows a kind of intelligence that young people are rarely given credit for. Film and television are different worlds, with different speeds, different pressures, and different kinds of audiences. A film actor can be precious about a single scene, but a television actor has to keep going, episode after episode, when the scripts are late and the days are long. Kim Da-mi did both, and she did both well, and she did it without making a big announcement about it. She simply took the next good script, wherever it came from, and did the work. I think that is a good model for anyone who is building a career in any field. Do not worry about which room is more important. Worry about whether the work in front of you is good, and whether you can do it honestly.
There is one more thing I keep thinking about, and it is the change of agency in 2022. It sounds like a small business detail, and in a way it is, but I think it tells us something about how she sees herself. She left ANDMARQ, the company that had been with her through her first big years, and she signed with United Artists Agency, a larger company with many famous names. That is not a decision a person makes lightly, and it is not a decision a person makes only for money. It is a decision about the next ten years, about who will help her choose scripts, about what kind of roles she wants to be offered, and about how she wants to be protected when the work gets hard. I respect that she made that decision quietly, without a public drama, and I respect that she has kept making quiet decisions ever since. A career is built out of a hundred small choices like that, and the public only ever sees the results.
If I could ask Kim Da-mi one question, I would not ask her about her favourite role, or about her awards, or about what she is doing next. I would ask her what she tells herself on the days when the work is not going well, when a scene is not working, when a director wants something she does not understand, when the waiting feels too long. I suspect her answer would be simple, and I suspect it would be about patience, about doing the next small thing well, about trusting the training she did years ago in a classroom at Incheon National University. I suspect she would say that the big moments take care of themselves, and that the small moments are where the real work happens. I do not know that for certain, because she does not give interviews like that, and I am not going to invent a quote she never said. But the shape of her career points in that direction, and I find that shape comforting.
For a reader who is young, or who is starting something late, or who feels invisible in their own life, I think Kim Da-mi’s story has a clear message, and it is not a loud one. It is this: you do not need to be the loudest person in the room. You do not need to tell everyone what you can do. You need to learn the work properly, you need to keep doing it when nobody is watching, and you need to be ready when the chance comes, because the chance may come only once, and it may come in a room full of 1,500 other people who want the same thing. If you are ready, and if you are true, the room will notice. It noticed Kim Da-mi, and it has not stopped noticing her since.
I will finish with the image that started this story for me, the girl in the rain, the girl with no memory, the girl who turned out to be stronger than everyone who hunted her. That image is a good picture of Kim Da-mi herself, not because her life has been dangerous, but because she has always been quieter than people expected, and stronger than people expected, and because she has never needed to explain herself to be understood. She lets the work do the explaining, and the work has explained her very well. I hope she keeps choosing roles that surprise us, I hope she keeps her private life private, and I hope that the next time a young actress walks into a room full of rivals, someone remembers that a quiet girl from Seoul once walked into a room like that, and walked out with the part that changed her life.
There is one more contrast in her recent work that I keep thinking about, and it is the pair of dramas she led in the same year, 2025. In Nine Puzzles she plays a profiler, a woman whose job is to look at a crime and work out what kind of mind made it happen. In A Hundred Memories she plays a bus attendant in the 1980s, a woman whose job is to smile at passengers, collect fares, and watch the world go past the window. Those two jobs could hardly be further apart, and yet both of them are about watching people. A profiler watches people to find the truth. A bus attendant watches people because the bus is full of them, and because a day on a bus is a day spent looking at faces. Kim Da-mi is good at both, because watching is what she has always done, in Seoul, in university, on small film sets, in audition rooms. She watches, she stores what she sees, and she brings it back when the story needs it. I think that is a skill anyone can learn, and I think it is a skill that is becoming rare, because so many of us spend our days looking at screens instead of looking at people. She looks at people, and her work shows it.
I also think about what her privacy costs her, because I do not want to pretend that it costs nothing. In an industry where a star’s value is often measured by how much attention they can attract, a person who refuses to attract attention is taking a risk. She gets fewer magazine covers, fewer headlines, fewer moments when the whole country is talking about her private life. But she also gets something that the loudest stars do not get: the freedom to be forgotten between projects, and the freedom to be remembered only for the work. When she comes back with a new drama, the audience does not have to forget a scandal or a controversy first. They only have to remember the last character she played, and then they have to let that character go, so they can meet the new one. That is a clean kind of fame, and I think it is a healthy kind of fame, and I think more young actors should be told that it is possible, because the loud kind of fame looks exciting from the outside, and it is often miserable from the inside.
If I were a young actor, and I could take one lesson from Kim Da-mi’s career, it would be this: learn the craft before you chase the fame, and choose the next part by asking how different it is from the last one, not by asking how big it is. A big part that repeats what you have already done will make you rich and bored. A small part that asks you to do something new will make you better, and being better is what makes a career last. Kim Da-mi has chosen the new thing again and again, from a witch to a restaurant manager to a lover to a friend to a profiler to a bus attendant to a scientist in a flood, and each choice has made her a little bit better, and a little bit harder to replace. That is the real secret of her career, and it is not a secret at all. It is just hard work, done quietly, over and over again, until the work speaks louder than any interview ever could.
Frequently Asked Questions
How did Kim Da-mi win the lead role in The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion?
She won it through an open audition, with about 1,500 people reported to have tried out for the part of Koo Ja-yoon. Director Park Hoon-jung chose her for the role, and the film was released in 2018. It became her first leading film role and the start of her wider fame.
What did Kim Da-mi study at university, and where?
She studied performing arts at Incheon National University in South Korea. Her training there covered voice, movement, and the close study of characters. That training shaped the calm, controlled style she later showed on screen.
Which Itaewon Class character did Kim Da-mi play, and what made her different?
She played Jo Yi-seo, the sharp and confident young manager of the restaurant at the centre of the drama. Yi-seo was blunt, clever, and loyal, and she often said exactly what she thought. The part was very different from the quiet Ja-yoon in The Witch.
Did Kim Da-mi and Choi Woo-shik work together before Our Beloved Summer?
Yes, they both appeared in The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion in 2018, although their characters were on opposite sides of that story. In Our Beloved Summer, which began in December 2021, they played former lovers who are forced to work together again. Their earlier film made the reunion easy for viewers to notice.
What kind of character does Kim Da-mi play in Nine Puzzles?
She plays Yoon E-na, a criminal profiler working for the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency in the Disney+ mystery thriller from 2025. A profiler tries to understand how a criminal thinks, so the role asks her to be observant, calm, and clever under pressure. She stars in the series alongside Son Suk-ku.
What was Kim Da-mi’s job in the 1980s drama A Hundred Memories?
She played Go Young-rye, a bus attendant, in the JTBC coming-of-age romance from 2025. The drama is set in the 1980s and tells a story about friendship and first love. It was a very different role from her work as a profiler in Nine Puzzles in the same year.
Has Kim Da-mi changed agencies during her career?
Yes, in May 2022 she decided not to renew her contract with ANDMARQ, and in August 2022 she signed with United Artists Agency. The move was reported in Korean entertainment news at the time. It came after her success in The Witch, Itaewon Class, and Our Beloved Summer.
