Between Steps premieres on Disney+ and Hulu with Choo Young-woo and Kim So-hyun
Ahn Pan-seok’s final drama, Between Steps, premieres Oct. 5 on ENA in Korea and on Disney+ and Hulu in the U.S., with Choo Young-woo and Kim So-hyun as robotics grad students figuring out how to fall in love.
Mina Park
Between Steps premiered Monday on ENA in Korea and the same day on Disney+ and Hulu in the United States. Canada has it on Disney+. Twelve episodes, Mondays and Tuesdays at 10 p.m. KST, with the finale set for Nov. 10.
Choo Young-woo plays Park Min-jae, a robotics doctoral student who was a competitive high school swimmer before osteosarcoma cost him a leg. At the Oct. 2 press conference, Choo described him as someone who puts dating on a bucket list because he is still anxious the cancer could return.
Kim So-hyun plays Im Yoo-jin, a clothing-and-textiles graduate who loses her path into her original master’s program after a campus incident and lands in the same mechanical-engineering lab. She is direct about what she wants. He is not. The conflicts stay mostly internal.
That pacing belongs to Ahn Pan-seok, who directed Something in the Rain, One Spring Night, Secret Love Affair, and The Midnight Romance in Hagwon. He died Aug. 12 at 64 after a cerebral hemorrhage. Filming had wrapped in February and editing was already finished, so the series airs as he left it.
Writer Min Hyo-jung, who wrote Full House and Cats on the Roof (Attic Cat), reunited with him on this script about 25 years after they last worked together. The Yongsan press event opened with a memorial video.
Choo, born June 5, 1999, turned down a JYP Entertainment idol scout offer in high school and chose the Korea National University of Arts instead. His parents, former models Choo Seung-il and Kang Sung-jin, moved the family from Sejong to Seoul so he could train.
After a 2021 web-drama debut, he spent a couple of years auditioning hard with little traction. Dual roles in JTBC’s The Tale of Lady Ok won him Best New Actor at the 61st Baeksang Arts Awards in 2025, and Netflix’s The Trauma Code: Heroes on Call made him a wider name the same year. For Between Steps, he worked with a prosthetic consultant on set so Min-jae’s walk and daily habits would not read as costume.
Kim So-hyun was born a day earlier, June 4, 1999, in Australia, and moved to Korea at four. She started acting as a child in 2006 and became a familiar face as young Yoon Bo-kyung in Moon Embracing the Sun (2012).
Adult leads followed in Who Are You: School 2015, Love Alarm, and last summer’s JTBC hit Good Boy opposite Park Bo-gum, which closed at a series-high 8.1 percent nationwide. She has been carrying romantic and period leads for a decade while Choo’s breakthrough is still recent. That gap shows up in the pairing: she plays the one who moves first.
The show also adds to Disney’s growing Asian drama list. Moving became the platform’s most-watched local original worldwide. A Shop for Killers and its second season have been major Asia-Pacific performers. Last year’s slate leaned into thrillers such as Hyper Knife, Nine Puzzles, Low Life, and Tempest. Between Steps is an ENA Monday-Tuesday romance rather than a binge thriller, but it still lands on the same Disney+ and Hulu shelf in North America.
If Ahn’s slower romances work for you, this is the one to start tonight. Two episodes a week is how it was built.
