Kim Jae-joong is back in the spotlight, this time as a suited shaman in a Korean-Japanese horror film and as a key insider voice in a K-pop documentary. Two decades after debuting with TVXQ, the second generation idol is quietly rewriting what long term fame looks like.
He first broke through in 2003 with TVXQ, later formed JYJ and then built a solo career in Korea and Japan. Now his new movie The Shrine: Whispers of the Evil Spirit and France Télévisions documentary K-pop, la déferlante coréenne frame him as an artist moving between industries, countries and generations.
Inside Kim Jae-joong’s New Horror Movie
Directed by Japanese filmmaker Kazuyoshi Kumakiri, The Shrine: Whispers of the Evil Spirit sends Kim’s character Myung-jin, a Korean shaman, to Kobe after three Korean students vanish at an abandoned shrine. There he confronts a spirit that refuses to leave his body. The film opens June 17 at CGV theaters across Korea.
For any fan searching Kim Jae-joong new movie, this cross border project is the answer. “When you sign onto a cross-border project like this, that’s bait you can’t resist,” he says, adding that he “figured something would come out of it that you couldn’t get any other way.”
Going in, it “felt completely new,” Kim recalls, with constant back and forth with Kumakiri even in the middle of takes. On screen that becomes a wild mix of a pastor in Catholic robes, Buddhist style shaman chants and a Hindu demon in a Japanese shrine, hiding what he calls “a lot of hidden mechanisms.”
From Idol to CEO and Variety Star
Kim has lived many idol lives already: breakout member of TVXQ in 2003, rebel who left to form JYJ, then solo artist working in Korea and Japan. Now he runs his management agency, looking after K-pop acts on its roster.
“The first job is to make them work commercially,” he explains of his artists, noting that their futures and livelihoods are tied to his. His logic is blunt: keep them happy so they make audiences happy, and everyone’s careers keep moving.
Away from the office, Kim is a regular on KBS cooking variety Stars’ Top Recipe at Fun-staurant, where celebrities pitch dishes to food industry buyers. His stint earned an Excellence Award at the KBS Entertainment Awards and introduced him to a new wave of casual viewers.
He has also opened his private life, inviting cameras to meet the family that adopted him at age 3, a household of eight older sisters and now more than a dozen nephews. He often credits his parents onstage, saying the shows work because their stories are real.
A Second-Generation Idol Rethinking the Future
He even says he is “not even close to that baseline” to start a family yet, still carrying “too much responsibility to take care of” before his own happiness.
Yet Kim refuses to slow down. In France Télévisions documentary K-pop, la déferlante coréenne, on France 4 and france.tv, he stands beside younger idols and hitmakers, a veteran who says “the longer you do this, the further you drift from anything like perfection.”