Kim Ji-won Returns With Doctor X And She’s Already Eyeing A Year-end Couple Award With Her Female Co-star

After a two-year hiatus, Kim Ji-won steps into a medical noir as a scalpel-wielding “dark hero” and the chemistry stealing the show isn’t romantic at all.

The question caught Kim Ji-won off guard, and her answer came almost before the sentence finished. Asked at a Seoul press event whether she and veteran actress Lee Jung-eun were angling for a year-end “Best Couple” award, the actress lit up: “Yes! Could that really happen?” Then, turning to the woman beside her, she threw up a finger-heart and the room dissolved into laughter.

It was a small, spontaneous moment. But it captured exactly why Doctor X: Mafia in White (닥터X: 하얀 마피아의 시대) is generating buzz before a single episode has aired and why the most talked-about pairing in Korea’s newest medical drama is a cross-generational womance rather than a conventional romance.

Doctor x poster / SBS

A Comeback Two Years in the Making

On October 7, SBS unveiled its new Friday–Saturday drama at a production presentation at the network’s headquarters in Yangcheon-gu, Seoul. Director Lee Jung-lim appeared alongside the central cast: Kim Ji-won, Lee Jung-eun, Son Hyun-joo, and Kim Woo-seok.

For global audiences, Kim’s presence is the headline. This is her first television role since Queen of Tears, the 2024 tvN megahit that shattered viewership records and became one of Netflix’s most-watched Korean titles worldwide vaulting her from established star to internationally recognized leading lady. Before that, she built her reputation across a remarkable run of hits written by Korea’s top screenwriters: The Heirs (2013) and Descendants of the Sun (2016), both penned by Kim Eun-sook, followed by the beloved Fight for My Way (2017) and the quietly devastating My Liberation Notes (2022).

Roughly two years later, she returns transformed. In Doctor X, Kim plays Gye Soo-jung (계수정) a genius surgeon who knows neither failure nor compromise, nicknamed the “mad dog of the operating room,” who dismantles entrenched corruption through sheer surgical brilliance. It’s a deliberate pivot from the tearful melodrama that made her a household name toward something colder and sharper: a “dark hero” in a medical noir, a register she’s never fully occupied before. For an actress who has specialized in warmth and vulnerability, that gamble is the most interesting thing about her comeback.

The Chemistry Nobody Expected to Lead With

Here’s the twist worth noting: in a drama built around a lone-wolf heroine, the relationship everyone keeps mentioning is the one between Kim’s surgeon and Lee Jung-eun’s character, Jang Hee-sook the brassy, money-obsessed head of a doctors-for-hire staffing agency who, beneath the chatter, is a shrewd operator pulling strings in the hospital’s power games.

Lee made clear the collaboration was no accident. “The truth is, I’d been looking for a chance to work with Kim Ji-won for a long time,” she said, noting that writers and directors she’d worked with “praised her so highly.” The admiration runs both ways. “I genuinely loved it,” Kim said of her co-star. “As everyone knows isn’t she just lovely? Watching her beside me was the happiness I found on set, and it was a moment where I learned a tremendous amount as an actor. I caught both rabbits happiness and growth.”

That mutual respect carries weight when you consider who Lee Jung-eun is. International viewers may not recognize the name, but they almost certainly know the face: she is the housekeeper Moon-gwang in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, the first non-English-language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. A longtime Bong collaborator she also voiced the pig in Okja Lee is one of Korea’s most quietly formidable character actors. The idea of a rising global star and a scene-stealing veteran egging each other toward a couple award is, frankly, better theater than most on-screen romances.

Kim Ji-won and Lee Jung-eun still from Doctor X / SBS

A Veteran’s Grace, a Rising Star’s Resolve

Asked for the secret behind her repeated on-screen chemistry with younger actresses, Lee deflected with characteristic humor “I’ve gotten older but I don’t act my age” before turning sincere. “I love working with juniors, and there’s so much to learn. The ones who’ve held the lead role for a long time carry a real diligence and the strength to bear the weight of the throne. That makes me feel secure.”

It’s a generous read, and a telling one. Lee is describing exactly the kind of discipline Kim has demonstrated across a decade of leads and, implicitly, endorsing her co-star’s move into unfamiliar territory. Kim, for her part, framed the on-set bond as something audiences will feel accumulate over time: “The chemistry we built as person to person I think viewers will feel it more and more as time goes on.”

Pressed on whether she’d rather share a couple award with Kim Ji-won or co-star Son Hyun-joo, Lee laughed and dodged with a diplomat’s instinct: “Whether it’s a couple award with Kim Ji-won or with Son Hyun-joo I’ll leave that to the viewers to decide.”

Why This One Is Worth Watching

Doctor X: Mafia in White premieres October 9 at 9:50 p.m. KST, airing Fridays and Saturdays, with the 12-episode series also streaming internationally on Netflix. The premise a surgeon who refuses to bend, slicing through the “white mafia” of ego and profit inside Gu Seo University Hospital slots neatly into Korea’s recent appetite for “cider” dramas, where protagonists deliver the cathartic satisfaction of toppling the powerful and the corrupt.

But the production presentation hinted that the real draw may be quieter than the medical-noir packaging suggests. Strip away the surgical theatrics and the corporate villainy, and what lingers is the image of two actors a generation apart, one ascendant and one revered throwing up finger-hearts and genuinely delighting in each other’s work. In an industry where chemistry is often manufactured, that kind of ease is rare. If it translates to the screen the way both actresses promise, the year-end “Best Couple” trophy they joked about might not be a joke for long.