Jihoon (지훈)

Park Ji-hoon built his public profile as a member of the short-lived but commercially significant project group Wanna One, then methodically reestablished himself as a solo act and, eventually, a credible television actor — a transition that culminated in his film *The Man Who Lived with the King* crossing the ten-million admissions mark and earning him the "ten million actor" designation, a benchmark that carries genuine commercial weight in South Korean cinema.

From idol competition to sustained career

Park Ji-hoon emerged through the competitive audition pipeline that defined mid-2010s K-pop, reaching Wanna One before going on to pursue solo work. His fandom, known as May, has remained a consistent presence across that nine-year arc. In June 2026 he held his fan concert 2026 Park Ji-hoon Fan-Con [RE(Reflect)] — described as the first such event in seven years — with both nights sold out, a signal that his audience had followed him through the genre shifts. A contemporaneous fan poll ranking male singers people most wanted to share an umbrella with placed him second, behind fellow Wanna One alumnus Ha Sung-woon, suggesting that the group's reunion activity in the same period had refreshed public affection for both men.

He is also a current member of TREASURE and its sub-unit T5, operating under YG Entertainment, which places him in a relatively unusual position: an artist maintaining an active idol group membership while simultaneously building a parallel acting filmography.

Acting work and *The Legend of the Cook Soldier*

The drama that dominated his press coverage in the first half of 2026 was the TVING original The Legend of the Cook Soldier (also rendered in coverage as *Cook Soldier Becomes a Legend* and *The Legendary Cook Soldier*), in which he plays Kang Sung-jae, a military cook navigating outpost politics, cooking competitions, and large-scale training crises. The series demonstrated measurable commercial momentum: viewership climbed from 1.7 percent at launch to 7.3 percent within the run, then reached a high of 10.8 percent by its sixth episode — a trajectory that drew comparisons favorable to other platform dramas of the same period.

Critical reception noted his range across comedy, fantasy, and character-growth registers, with one industry roundup grouping him alongside Shin Hye-sun and Moon Sang-min as actors who had delivered two successful consecutive projects in the first half of the year. In interviews around the drama, Park Ji-hoon addressed the psychological discipline behind that consistency, stating that he found ostentatious self-promotion distasteful and crediting a deliberate effort to maintain the mindset he had carried since his debut nine years earlier. He also acknowledged, with some humor, that the cooking classes he undertook for the role had diminished rather than increased his enthusiasm for cooking, though his knife technique improved.

The role followed directly from *The Man Who Lived with the King*, the film in which he played the historical figure Danjong and which crossed ten million admissions — a figure that placed him among a select group of Korean actors whose work has reached that threshold. Coverage from mid-2026 noted that his *Cook Soldier* performance had effectively erased the residue of that earlier role, marking a clean transition rather than a typecast continuation.

Public profile and *You Quiz* record

A measure of his mainstream visibility came when his episode of tvN's long-running talk program *You Quiz on the Block* set a viewership record that stood until June 2026, when it was broken by the episode featuring NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang — an episode that became the program's highest-rated in two years and secured the top position across all channels in its time slot. The detail is incidental to Park Ji-hoon's own career but indicates the audience scale his *You Quiz* appearance had attracted.

The Mnet Plus reality series *WANNA ONE GO: Back to Base*, which concluded its final episode in the same month, offered a retrospective on the nine years since Wanna One's activity and included Park Ji-hoon participating in fan-requested challenges alongside his former groupmates.

Standing

At the midpoint of 2026, Park Ji-hoon occupied a position that relatively few K-pop trained artists reach cleanly: a verifiable box-office milestone in film, a streaming drama with a strong ratings trajectory, an active idol group affiliation under one of the industry's major labels, and a fan base that had demonstrated its loyalty across a format shift from music-focused to acting-focused output. Whether that dual positioning — group member and solo actor — continues to coexist or resolves into one lane remains the open question in his career.