Lee Joon-hyuk's New TVING Office Drama Is Already Generating Real Buzz

Lee Joon-hyuk has spent nearly two decades building one of the most quietly impressive careers in Korean entertainment — from a corrupt prosecutor in Stranger to a 20kg-heavier mob villain in The Roundup: No Way Out — and his next role is a deliberate gear shift. He's playing Gong Eun-tae, the sales team leader at Hongseong International who wins the lottery jackpot and still shows up to work the next morning. That premise sounds like a comedy setup, but the show is framing itself as something closer to a grounded office drama about what work actually means to people who've never done anything else.

The press conference for TVING original Even the Lottery Winner Goes to Work (로또 1등도 출근합니다) was held at CGV Yongsan in Seoul, and the cast — including Seo Hyun-woo, Oh Dae-hwan, Hong Jin-ki, Ha Yul-ri, and Baek Ye-in — showed up with the kind of genuine ensemble energy that's hard to fake. Director Yoon Young-bin described Lee Joon-hyuk as the most diligent actor he's ever worked with, noting that despite complaining about the volume of lines on set, he never once cut or glossed over a single one. That detail says a lot about what kind of show this is going to be.

Lee Joon-hyuk talked about why Eun-tae landed differently for him than his previous roles. He said he's spent close to 20 years acting, across more than 50 projects, and that felt to him like a life of doing nothing but work — which is exactly Eun-tae's situation. A man who worked hard, never got properly recognized, never let himself get angry, and then suddenly has a reason to consider doing something reckless. The character's internal shift after the lottery win is the engine of the show, not the money itself.

The ensemble structure is a deliberate contrast to his last widely loved role. He noted that playing Dong-jae in Good or Bad, Dong-jae (좋거나 나쁜 동재) was a solo act — one character driving the whole drama forward alone. Lottery Winner is built around team chemistry. Seo Hyun-woo plays Yang Jun-ho, a sales team associate who is older and more senior in tenure than Eun-tae but lower in rank — a very specific kind of workplace tension that anyone who's navigated Korean office hierarchy will recognize immediately. Ha Yul-ri plays the team's only contract worker, Lee Ji-hye, described as relentlessly upbeat despite her precarious position.

Director Yoon's stated angle for the show is worth paying attention to: no romance, no villain, just the friction between good people with different goals. He called it a kind of "office noir" where the conflict comes from competing values rather than a clear antagonist. That's a harder thing to pull off than a straightforward workplace comedy, and it's the reason the press conference generated as much genuine word-of-mouth as it did — people left talking about the premise, not just the cast.

For context on where Lee Joon-hyuk sits right now: he has Lottery Winner airing on TVING and a confirmed casting in SBS's upcoming Awakening (각성) announced in close succession. His career arc — from a film direction major who was talked into acting, to a music video appearance in 2007, to a breakout in the 2009 KBS drama Three Brothers, to Stranger, to the Along with the Gods films, to The Roundup: No Way Out — is one of the more interesting slow-burn trajectories in the industry. He's not a name that exploded overnight, and that probably makes him exactly the right person to play a man who's been quietly grinding for decades and finally has a moment to decide what it was all for.

The show is a TVING original, so it streams on TVING. If you've been sleeping on Lee Joon-hyuk's range — and a lot of international viewers still are — Stranger (비밀의 숲) is the place to start before this one drops. Seo Dong-jae is one of the most written-about supporting characters in recent Korean drama history for a reason, and watching that performance makes the choice to cast him as a lottery-winning everyman feel genuinely interesting rather than just surprising.