Meeting with reporters at a cafe in Seoul’s Samcheong-dong on Jan. 22, the actor lit up talking about his co-star. “Youn-jung is so easygoing and genuinely kind,” he said, adding with a laugh, “She’s the type to joke around with anyone without hesitation.”
He called her “an incredible partner,” and shared a story from their first shoot in Japan: “She bought souvenirs and handed them out to the whole crew. She’s open with everyone, not just me.” He added, “She’ll break the ice with a simple, ‘What did you eat yesterday?’ I try not to put up walls when I’m working, and we were totally in sync that way.”
According to Kim, that openness shaped the set’s energy. “Even when things were still new and a bit awkward, she wasn’t closed off. We’d ask, ‘What if we try this? What about that?’ We exchanged ideas clearly, and it helped us click fast, performance-wise.”
"Can This Love Be Translated?" follows multilingual interpreter Joo Hojin (Kim Seon-ho), who’s assigned to global superstar Cha Muhee (Go Youn-jung), setting off an unpredictable romantic-comedy ride. Kim plays a genius with six languages―English, Japanese, Italian, and more―who’s ironically clumsy when it comes to the language of love, bringing both gravitas and tender nuance to Hojin’s slow-to-open heart.
On-screen, Hojin is thoughtful and hyper-rational, speaking only after sorting through his thoughts, while Muhee blurts things out when flustered and regrets them later. Off-screen, Kim says their personalities flip: he identifies as an “F” (feeling) in MBTI terms, while Go is a “T” (thinking). To deepen their character work, the pair even swapped lines during rehearsals.
“We’d trade parts and I’d ask, ‘Does this make sense to you?’ We did that across so many scenes,” Kim explained. “It really helped. I started thinking, ‘Oh, so a T would deliver this simply and directly,’ and that led me to understand Hojin more deeply.”
Kim also praised Go’s work ethic. “Her passion for acting is incredible,” he said, noting how much they communicated and rehearsed to build their scenes. “We’d try bold ideas―even if some got cut in the edit. Those tiny, experimental moments raise the energy on set. We both kept volunteering to go first, and Youn-jung always caught those beats with great instincts.”
Shot on location across Korea, Japan, Canada, and Italy, the production brought the cast and crew especially close. Kim even credits Go for getting him into social media trends. “I wasn’t really into SNS,” he admitted. “But Youn-jung enjoys that stuff and started showing me things. Shorts turned out to be surprisingly addictive―I started asking her, ‘Did you see this one?’ Before long, we were swapping challenge ideas, not just running lines.”
All 12 episodes of "Can This Love Be Translated?" dropped Jan. 16 on Netflix, quickly climbing to No. 2 on the Global Top 10 Non-English TV list.
(SBS Entertainment News | Kang Sun-ae)