Pagaehun

Park Tae-hoon, who performs and acts under the name Pagaehun, built his public profile through the idol system before establishing himself as a credible screen presence — a transition that few acts from the Produce 101 generation have managed as cleanly. Best known internationally as a member of the project group Wanna One, he has since accumulated a parallel acting career that, as of 2026, includes a film that crossed ten million admissions and a streaming drama whose ratings climbed from 1.7 to 10.8 percent across six episodes.

From Wanna One to solo ground

Pagaehun entered the public consciousness through competition, eventually becoming part of the Wanna One project group that defined a particular era of Korean idol television. Nine years on from that debut period, the reunion reality series *WANNA ONE GO: Back to Base* gave the group and their fandom — known as Wannables — a formal occasion to reflect on that shared history. A fan poll conducted around the reunion period placed him second among male singers fans would most want to share an umbrella with on a rainy day, trailing only fellow Wanna One member Ha Sung-woon, a result that points to the durability of the loyalty the group generated.

His own account of the intervening years is candid. In a press interview tied to his 2026 drama, he described maintaining his original mindset across nine years of work and expressed particular distaste for public boasting — an attitude he has cited as a personal anchor since his earliest days in the industry.

A pivot to acting

The acting career accelerated sharply in 2026. Three months before the drama *The Legend of the Cook Soldier* began airing, Pagaehun reached the ten-million-admissions threshold as a film actor with *The Man Who Lived with the King*, in which he played a young King Danjong. That milestone — referred to in Korean entertainment coverage as becoming a "ten million actor" — placed him in a selective group and significantly raised the stakes attached to his next project.

*The Legend of the Cook Soldier*, a TVING original, arrived as that next project. The series follows Kang Sung-jae, a soldier assigned to military cooking duties who enters a competition to prevent the closure of his outpost. Pagaehun received consistent notice for his range across the show's tonal shifts — comedy, fantasy sequences, and a sustained growth narrative — with one outlet observing that he had "erased all traces of Danjong" to inhabit the role fully. The drama's viewership trajectory, climbing from a 1.7 percent premiere to 7.3 percent and eventually reaching a peak of 10.8 percent by its sixth episode, placed it above a concurrent box-office drama in the ratings. Critics grouped him alongside Shin Hye-sun and Moon Sang-min as actors who demonstrated sustained competitiveness across two consecutive works in the first half of 2026.

Achievements

The ten-million-admissions figure for *The Man Who Lived with the King* represents a concrete commercial benchmark in South Korean cinema, where that threshold carries industry significance as a marker of wide mainstream reach. On the streaming side, *The Legend of the Cook Soldier* posted a peak television rating of 10.8 percent, a figure strong enough to be cited as a benchmark when a subsequent *You Quiz on the Block* episode featuring NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang broke Park Ji-hoon's previous record for that programme's ratings — itself evidence that his episode had held the show's recent high-water mark.

On the music side, his 2026 fan concert *2026 Park Ji-hoon Fan-Con [RE(Reflect)]* sold out both of its dates, marking his first fan concert in seven years and drawing on a stated fanbase figure of 16.88 million. The event was framed publicly as a reunion with his fandom May, with whom he noted that his affection had remained unchanged despite the passage of time.

Activities

Alongside the drama run, Pagaehun continued to engage with fan-facing content and press. The *Cook Soldier* promotion cycle included candid behind-the-scenes disclosures — notably that many of the drama's comedic sequences were improvised on set — and a sustained series of character updates that tracked Kang Sung-jae's evolving relationships within the military kitchen setting. His appearance on *WANNA ONE GO: Back to Base* ran concurrently, keeping him visible across both the drama and idol-reunion spaces simultaneously during mid-2026.