Park Bo-gum and Kim Yoo-jung Reunite 10 Years After ‘Love in the Moonlight’

Ten years after Love in the Moonlight turned Park Bo-gum and Kim Yoo-jung into one of K-drama’s most memorable young couples, the cast is officially coming back together.

KBS confirmed on August 13 that Park Bo-gum, Kim Yoo-jung, Jinyoung, Chae Soo-bin and Kwak Dong-yeon will appear in a special two-part variety program celebrating the 10th anniversary of the 2016 historical romance. The special, titled Gureumi Dasi Geurin Dalbit in Korean, will premiere on KBS2 on September 16 at 8:30 p.m. KST, followed by its second and final episode on September 23 at 9 p.m. KST.

Rather than simply sitting together in a studio and watching old clips, the five actors went on an overnight trip to Hongcheon in Gangwon Province. And according to KBS, the reunion began with Park Bo-gum himself.

Park Bo-gum reportedly proposed celebrating the anniversary together

The production says Park Bo-gum wanted to do something meaningful for the drama’s 10th anniversary and suggested bringing the cast back together.

Kim Yoo-jung, Jinyoung, Chae Soo-bin and Kwak Dong-yeon agreed despite their individual schedules, resulting in the five actors filming a two-day, one-night trip in Hongcheon beginning August 4.

That detail gives the special a different emotional weight from a network simply assembling former co-stars for promotional content. The cast members themselves have repeatedly demonstrated that their relationship survived long after filming ended. Park, Kim, Jinyoung, Chae and Kwak Dong-yeon previously reunited in the 2022 variety program Young Actors’ Retreat, where the Love in the Moonlight team competed and traveled alongside casts from Itaewon Class and The Sound of Magic.

Park Bo-gum also invited several of his Moonlight co-stars to support his debut as host of The Seasons in 2025. Reports at the time noted that the actors had continued keeping in touch years after the drama ended.

The new program, however, is built entirely around their drama and the decade they have spent since making it.

Why ‘Love in the Moonlight’ mattered

When Love in the Moonlight premiered in 2016, Park Bo-gum played Crown Prince Lee Yeong while Kim Yoo-jung starred as Hong Ra-on, a young woman living disguised as a man who enters the palace as a eunuch.

Their relationship developed from playful conflict into a forbidden palace romance, while Jinyoung, Chae Soo-bin and Kwak Dong-yeon completed the drama’s central group of young characters. KBS World still describes the story around the complicated relationship between Crown Prince Yeong and Ra-on as she attempts to protect her identity.

The drama became one of KBS’s defining hits of the period, reaching a peak nationwide rating of 23.3 percent. Park Bo-gum and Kim Yoo-jung later received the Best Couple Award at the 2016 KBS Drama Awards.

For international K-drama fans, the series also became an important introduction to both actors.

Park Bo-gum was emerging from the enormous success of Reply 1988, while Kim Yoo-jung was transitioning from a celebrated child actress into adult leading roles. A decade later, both have built careers that look very different from where they stood in 2016. That makes seeing them together again less like a conventional promotion and more like opening a time capsule.

Fans were asking for this before the cast had even finished filming

Excitement began weeks before KBS confirmed the September broadcast dates. When reports first emerged in June that a reunion special was being prepared, international fans immediately celebrated the possibility of seeing the five actors together again.

One Reddit user called Love in the Moonlight “one of the best dramas for me” while reacting with excitement to the reunion news. Other viewers began discussing which other classic K-dramas deserved similar anniversary projects. That nostalgia is not limited to Park Bo-gum and Kim Yoo-jung’s romance.

Fans have also remained attached to the friendship between the wider cast. Reactions to an earlier reunion included viewers saying they hoped the actors would remain friends and remembering how much they enjoyed watching the Moonlight team together on Young Actors’ Retreat.

For longtime viewers, seeing all five actors together has become part of the appeal.

It also arrives during a wave of K-drama reunion specials

Love in the Moonlight is not the only major 2016 drama using its 10th anniversary as an opportunity to bring its actors back together.

Korean broadcasters have increasingly experimented with reunion variety shows built around dramas that developed lasting fandoms. The 10th-anniversary projects for Guardian: The Lonely and Great God (Goblin) and Love in the Moonlight have helped turn cast reunions into a noticeable television trend. The format works particularly well for international K-drama audiences.

Streaming has given older Korean dramas unusually long lives. Someone who watched Love in the Moonlight during its original 2016 broadcast may experience the special as nostalgia, while another viewer who discovered it only recently can see what happened to the cast a decade after production. It effectively allows a finished drama to become culturally active again without requiring a sequel. And in the case of Love in the Moonlight, a sequel would be particularly difficult to recreate with the same youthful atmosphere.

A reunion trip does not have that problem.

The five actors are returning as very different stars

Part of the fascination will be seeing how much changed during those 10 years.

In 2016, the cast were closely associated with the idea of rising “youth stars.” KBS now describes the reunion as five actors who went on to become figures in globally watched Korean content. But the special appears designed to look backward as much as forward. During the Hongcheon trip, the cast reportedly revisited memories from filming and quickly returned to the comfortable, playful atmosphere they had shared years earlier.

For viewers who remember Crown Prince Lee Yeong, Hong Ra-on, Kim Yoon-sung, Jo Ha-yeon and Kim Byung-yeon, that may be more appealing than any elaborate variety-show mission. The question is not whether the actors can recreate their characters. It is whether the chemistry that made people care about them in 2016 still appears when they are simply sitting together as themselves.

A 10-year reunion that came from the cast itself

Anniversary specials can easily feel like nostalgia engineered by a broadcaster. This one has a more personal starting point.

Park Bo-gum wanted to commemorate the drama. His former co-stars agreed. Ten years after the series first brought them together, they cleared their schedules and went away for two days. That simplicity may be precisely why fans are responding so warmly. Love in the Moonlight ended its story years ago. But apparently, the people who made it never completely left one another behind.

And on September 16, fans will finally get to join their reunion.