Lee Byung-hun Is a North Korean Spy in Disney+'s New K-Drama

Disney+ has confirmed production is underway on The Koreans, a Korean reimagining of the critically acclaimed FX series The Americans — and the cast assembled for the project is generating significant buzz. Lee Byung-hun, one of South Korea's most internationally recognized actors, leads the series opposite Han Ji-min, with director Ahn Gil-ho, who helmed The Glory and Secret Forest, at the helm.

The premise alone is the kind that tends to travel: an ordinary-looking middle-class couple living in early 1990s South Korea turns out to be a pair of elite North Korean spies — and a South Korean counterintelligence agent is closing in on them. The series explores what the original The Americans made compelling: the collision between professional mission and personal identity, between patriotism and love, in a framework where no one is entirely what they appear to be.

The Cast: Lee Byung-hun and Han Ji-min

Lee Byung-hun brings a specific kind of weight to a spy role. The actor has spent three decades building a career defined by psychological complexity — from his breakout performance in JSA: Joint Security Area to his acclaimed international work in Squid Game Season 2 and films like G.I. Joe and The Magnificent Seven. He is one of only a handful of Korean actors whose name alone generates interest outside Korea, and his presence in The Koreans signals Disney+'s ambition for the series to travel globally.

Han Ji-min is equally well-chosen for the role. Known for her ability to play warmth and concealment simultaneously — qualities on full display in Welcome to Samdalri and One Spring Night — she brings exactly the kind of quiet complexity that a role requiring a character to live an entirely constructed life demands. A spy drama works best when the audience genuinely doesn't know who to believe. With these two leads, that ambiguity is baked in from the start.

The Original That Inspired It

The Americans ran for six seasons on FX between 2013 and 2018, and it is broadly considered one of the finest American television dramas of the past two decades. The series won the Golden Globe for Best Drama Series in 2019 and was named among AFI's best television programs for five consecutive years. What made it distinctive was its willingness to ask genuinely uncomfortable questions about loyalty and identity through the lens of Cold War espionage — questions that land differently when you transplant the story to early 1990s Korea, a country still navigating the aftermath of decades of authoritarian rule and a division that had defined its entire modern identity.

The Korean adaptation was written by Park Eun-kyo, whose previous work includes Made in Korea and Mother. The production companies behind the project are IMAGINUS, which produced Typhoon and My Family, and Studio AA.

Why 1990s Korea Is the Right Setting

Setting The Koreans in the early 1990s is a deliberate creative decision that opens up a specific kind of story. This was a period of significant social and political transition in South Korea: the country had held its first direct presidential election in 1987, democracy was still establishing its footing, and Korean culture was undergoing a modernization that would eventually seed the global explosion of K-pop and K-drama that came later.

Against that backdrop, a story about ordinary-seeming people who are actually instruments of a foreign government's intelligence apparatus carries a particular charge. The themes of authenticity, hidden loyalty, and the performance of a normal life resonate differently when the society doing the watching is itself still deciding what it wants to be.

The period setting also gives the production a visual and tonal distinctiveness that contemporary dramas set in modern Seoul can't easily replicate — one that audiences who grew up with 1990s Korean culture will recognize immediately and that international viewers may find richly textured.

Disney+'s Korean Bet Is Getting Bigger

The Koreans is part of a larger slate of Korean originals that Disney+ is developing, reflecting a sustained bet on K-content's ability to attract subscribers globally. The platform has also announced productions including Made in Korea, Perfect Crown (starring IU and Byun Woo-seok), Portraits of Delusion (starring Suzy and Kim Seon-ho), Typhoon, and The Remarried Empress (with a cast that includes Shin Min-a, Ji Joo-hun, Lee Jong-seok, and Lee Se-young).

The Korean streaming market and the global appetite for Korean content have matured enough that productions like The Koreans are no longer positioned as regional experiments. With a globally recognized lead actor, an award-winning source material, and a director whose previous work has already demonstrated global appeal, this is Disney+ making a project it expects to compete internationally.

No premiere date has been announced yet, but production is officially underway. Given the ambition of the project and the track record of the people attached to it, The Koreans is already one of the more anticipated upcoming Korean dramas in the streaming pipeline.

The Director Behind The Glory

Ahn Gil-ho is not a safe choice for a prestige spy drama — he is the right one. His work on The Glory, the revenge drama that became one of Netflix's most-watched Korean originals, demonstrated his ability to sustain slow-burn tension across a multi-episode arc without losing the audience. Secret Forest, his earlier work, is widely considered one of the finest Korean crime dramas of the past decade. Both share a quality that The Koreans will need: patience with moral complexity and the willingness to let characters remain genuinely ambiguous rather than collapsing into clearly defined sides.

Spy dramas succeed when an audience can hold two contradictory truths about the same people simultaneously. Ahn Gil-ho's track record suggests he knows exactly how to construct that kind of sustained dual reality over the course of a full season.

What to Watch For

No premiere date has been confirmed beyond the announcement that production is officially underway. Disney+ has positioned Korean originals as global events rather than regional releases, and The Koreans — with its internationally recognizable lead actor, award-winning source material, and a director whose previous work has already traveled globally — fits that model exactly. The full release window will likely come with a promotional push commensurate with the project's ambitions. For K-drama fans tracking what's in production, this one already has the pieces in place to matter when it arrives.