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

Canonical: https://ktrenz.com/k-culture/k-drama-ktrenz/lee-joon-hyuk-s-new-tving-office-drama-is-already-generating-real-buzz-300

## Article
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.