Childhood & Early Life
Kim Seul-gi was born on October 10, 1991 in Busan, South Korea in a lower middle class family. She was the second child, and was a day dreamer since her very childhood. She was known to be a rebel in the family who dreamed about being a celebrity someday, but her mother wasn’t supportive of that, thinking that it might cost them a lot of fortune if her daughter goes that way. But somehow, Kim knew the value of her dreams, and this got her working harder towards achieving her goals, and the rest is history.
Despite bad financial condition, the family didn’t believe in crying about it. They were quite content about not having much to survive on, and joked about it every now and then. And that was where Kim got her sense of humour from. She liked making people laugh, and this turned her into a popular kid in school.
By the time she was in high school, she hadn’t thought about a career in the entertainment field, due to the family opposition. But something happened that transformed her outlook towards life and she decided it was time to let everything go, and she left for Seoul.
She suffered heartbreak in the final year of high school, which enabled her to leave everything behind and move forward. While struggling with depression, she started doing comedy and at the same time she continued her studies in the Seoul Institute of Arts. She became part of a few college theatre productions and eventually, she was selected for a live comedy show SNL Korea, a stint which she got with the help of a director who worked with her in one of the her early plays.
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Career
In 2010, she made an appearance on the hugely popular variety show ‘Infinite Challenge’ and this small time role got her the job of a commentator and a crew member for ‘Saturday Night Live Korea’ in 2011, and she remained part of show for all the four seasons after that. She gained some pretty good advertisement gigs and carried on with the auditions to venture into the fiction TV.
When career in films was not going the way she intended it to, she turned towards independent films and starred in two indie films in 2012 - ‘Dong-haeng’ and ‘Pyung Haeng-sun’.
By then, she had also ventured into the television world with the romance drama ‘Heartstrings’ in 2011 and the next year, she appeared in ‘21st Century Family’. Although she was hugely dissatisfied with the length and overall quality of her roles, she knew she had to move up the ladder slowly to achieve the success that she desired and as a result, she kept doing those smaller roles for the next couple of years.
In 2012, she appeared in two drama specials for ‘Noh Sook-ja’s Whereabouts’ and ‘Another Wedding’.
In 2013, she became a part of the cast of horror anthology film titled ‘Horror Stories 2’, a sequel to highly successful and critically acclaimed ‘Horror Stories’. The film had four segments in total and Kim appeared in the segment titled ‘The Accident’. She shone in a small role as Yoon Mi-ra, and that resulted in some better roles in both films and TV dramas.
In 2013, she appeared in dramas such as ‘Flower Boys Next Door’, ‘Pretty Man’ and ‘Reply 1994’. And once again, her performance was praised.
She was maintaining a fine balance between all the three aspects of the South Korean entertainment industry - films, TV dramas and variety shows. In 2013 alone, she appeared in four variety shows such as ‘20s Choice Awards’, ‘Infinite Challenge’, ‘World Challenge’ and ‘Hidden Singer 2’.
Working back to back and constantly making the audiences aware of her talent through perpetual appearances, she slowly started gaining a fan base on her own and more industry people started recognizing her talent.
The year 2014 turned out to be the busiest year of her life until that point. She was signed on for films such as ‘Miss Granny’, ‘Ode to my Father’ and ‘Mood of the Day’ and TV series’ ‘I’m Dying Soon’, ‘The Ideal Mermaid’, ‘Discovery of Love’ and ‘A Resentful Woman’s Diary’. The massively busy year saw her appearing only in one variety show - ‘Witch Hunt’.
As she started gaining more prominence, the length of her roles and their significance also increased and this made her concentrate more on the TV roles.
In 2015, she appeared in ‘Kill me, Heal Me’, ‘Oh My Ghostess’ and ‘Splash Splash Love’.
She appeared in a cameo in the film ‘Mood of the Day’ in 2016, and in the very same year, she also made quite a few solid appearances in the series’ ‘The Second Last Love’ and ‘Love in the Moonlight’. She ended the fairly successful year with ‘Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok-joo’ and ‘The Legend of the Blue Sea’. In the latter one, she essayed the role of a mermaid and in the former one she appeared as a supermarket employee.
The year 2017 came with the series’ ‘Three Colour Fantasy’ and ‘The Guardians’ and a science fiction film titled ‘Fabricated City’, which was sadly met with some below average reviews. In the same year, she appeared in one of the most popular South Korean variety shows titled ‘Happy Together’.
