CELEB

Lim Young-Woong "Love, and love, and love again" Pt.1

As the interview drew to a close, I asked Lim Young-woong what, in his view, makes a life complete.

by 박세회 2026.08.26

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블랙 니트 아워레가시. 헤링본 팬츠 오프화이트. 블랙 로퍼 르메르.

How was today’s shoot?

It was fun. This was my first time doing a magazine cover shoot, but the editor in charge of the visual direction guided everything so well. All I had to do was follow along—and then before I knew it, the day was over.

That editor was very appreciative; they said you were a pleasure from start to finish, and it was close to ten straight hours of shooting.

Not at all. It was all thanks to the great direction. I really didn’t do anything.

It seems to me that the finer details of a person’s character really come out in small exchanges like this. It may not seem like much, but you have this way of declining a compliment without making the other person feel dismissed—and even when you demonstrate a sort of humility, it never comes across as excessive or uncomfortable. How do you do that?

It’s not that I consciously tell myself, I should be humble, I should demonstrate good character, or I should be kind, and then act accordingly. I just behave as I am, as I genuinely feel in the moment, and then I think people are generous enough to see it in a positive light. That said, I do think my fans have helped shape who I am. When I do something, and they tell me that I’m “kind,” “upright,” or “humble,” I do find myself acting that way more and more, little by little.

So your fans have a real impact.

Well, my mother certainly did her best to raise me well, to start. But since I started my career, yes, my fans have continued to guide my growth in the right direction.

Sometimes I wonder if my sense of self is shaped less by my own “will” but by the reactions of the people around me—would this be something similar?

I’d say so. Whenever I do something, the response from my fans is very active. And so those reactions, in their turn, shape how I behave.

That’s a really interesting way of putting it. You know, now that I’m actually chatting with you face to face, you seem much more introverted and calm than you do on variety shows.

That makes sense. I’m a bit shy around people I don’t know. When I’m not surrounded by people I’m already close with, I tend to talk a lot less.

That’s not how you come across in High Valley, Top Hero.

Doing High Valley, Top Hero is actually hugely outside of my normal comfort zone. It helps that a lot of the folks on the show are already friends of mine in real life; they’re people I feel comfortable around. And on top of that the production team really went out of their way to create an environment where I could feel at ease. It helped to have Siwol there, too. (Note: Siwol, Young-woong’s dog, was also present for this day’s shoot and interview as well.)

Beyond the friends who appear on High Valley, Top Hero, you famously have another circle of close friends, right? Out on the football pitch. In fact, you’ve graduated from the level of the average football club to running an entire league.

That’s right. I'm the owner of Returns FC, and I also oversee the Korea Amateur League (KA League), which consists of eight amateur teams. Sports have a way of bringing people together—all it takes is one game to start getting close. I’m the same way. You play a game, you grab a beer, and before you know it, voila! You’re friends. I’m not introverted at all on the pitch.

So football is the way to get to know you.

Definitely the fastest way. Though getting into our league isn’t exactly easy.

How hard are we talking? If you had to compare it to the K League?

Our team would probably rank around the middle of the K5 League in the Seoul area. Across our league as a whole, the standard ranges from K5 to K6.

That’s a crazy high standard. Are there specific requirements for joining?

There are actually quite a few. To start, former professional players are allowed, but only after they’ve been retired for a certain number of years. There are also age restrictions. We currently don’t accept players born after 2000. The league was founded as a league for amateur footballers whose dreams of going professional never came true, so naturally it’s centered on people in their thirties and older. We also found that once people in their twenties get in the mix, the balance really starts to break down.

Oh man, I can imagine. Twenty-somethings are way too fast. It feels like the matches just wouldn’t work.

Exactly, it changes the game. We considered introducing rules like, “only non-professionals in their twenties are allowed, but players in their thirties can have a professional background,” or something along those lines. But ultimately that just seemed unnecessarily complicated.

All this football talk has your eyes literally sparkling.

That’s what happens, the second anyone mentions football. (laughs)

So you’ve tried other sports, too, but football is still the one?

I recently took up golf, but at this point nothing’s come close to matching the thrill I get from football. And really, in golf, there are far more bad shots than good ones. (laughs) Besides, no matter how perfectly I hit a golf ball or how far it flies, it still can’t compare to the feeling of scoring a goal.

Yeah, I suppose nothing really beats that feeling. I still remember scoring a goal against the class next door back in high school, just in a pick-up game over lunch.

That’s football. I just think it’s amazing, how vividly those moments stay with you, no matter how much time has passed. I can still remember almost every dramatic goal I scored as a kid.

You were a youth league player for a while, weren’t you ?

Only for about a year in elementary school. I’ve heard there’s this rumor going around that I have a competitive football background, but honestly, around here, a single year in elementary school doesn’t really count at all. For all practical purposes, I’m just an ordinary amateur.

브이넥 니트, 포켓 셔츠, 블랙 로퍼 모두 르메르. 그레이 와이드 팬츠 메종 마르지엘라. 벨트 생 로랑 by 안토니 바카렐로. 빈티지 워치 파텍 필립. 화이트 삭스 스타일리스트 소장품.

I saw you play on The Gentlemen’s League (Let’s Play Soccer, JTBC) the other day. You were genuinely impressive!

That’s because the production team was kind enough to edit together all the moments where I actually played well.

See? This is exactly the gracious humility I was talking about earlier.

Oh, this isn’t humility. They really only used the clips where I looked good.

I don’t think I’ve ever spent this long talking about football in an interview with a singer, but let me ask you one last question. If you’d stayed with football after elementary school, how far do you honestly think you could have gone?

I sincerely believe that if I’d kept playing, I’d be on the national team today.

Whoa! In what position?

Probably where Lee Kang-in plays, I would think? He moves between winger and midfielder depending on the situation, and those are the positions I play as well. To be honest, when I was younger, I always preferred playing in Lionel Messi’s position best. If I’d pursued football seriously, I think I would have been heavily influenced by the way Messi plays.

You love football so much—why did you give it up?

I was much more introverted than I am now, back in elementary school, so I gave up pretty early on. Oddly enough, it was after I stopped playing that I found a bit more confidence. I’d had just enough training that I would really stand out, any time I played with ordinary people. It’s ironic, but I only became confident about my football after I’d quit. When you’re surrounded by kids who are all excellent, it’s hard to shine.

블랙 니트 아워레가시. 안경 플라스틱 프로덕트.

We’ll come back to this later, but I’ve always felt that some of your performances are quite literally perfect, right down to the placement of every pause. I wonder if that musical precision is, in some way, connected to your introverted nature.

(The introversion means) I do tend to speak less, and I spend a lot of time thinking. I imagine these things have probably helped me make better music.

I’ve heard that introverts are more likely to have perfectionist tendencies.

I don’t know if I'd call it perfectionism exactly, but I do tend to think things through very carefully before taking action. And now that I think about it, I suppose I do try to make things as close to perfect as I can.

So even in rehearsal, you’re trying to perfect every pause, every breath?

Well, I never think about those things when I’m actually performing. That’s what all the rehearsing is for—to make the real thing come out naturally. Once I’m on stage, my focus is on communicating with the audience, not on how I’m singing. By that point the technical aspects have all been thought through and practiced until they're second nature.

As someone who’s followed your career since your debut, I have this impression that the way you sing has changed over the years. Your voice feels more relaxed and supple now, more… lovely, even.

You’re right. Up through Mr. Trot (TV Chosun), I sang in a much heavier way. My sole focus was on communicating with the audience. At least in my own opinion, if you want to communicate effectively, you need to sing primarily with your chest voice. When we speak normally, we don’t use our head voice, right? Nor do we consciously speak using diaphragmatic breathing. We just talk in our natural register—and that ordinary speaking voice resonates in the chest. So back then, even when I was hitting high notes, I relied mainly on my chest voice. Compared to head voice, it naturally has a heavier quality. After that, though, as I continued developing my sound and exploring different genres, I started thinking, Why not cultivate a prettier, lighter sound as well? So I began working on my head voice. That’s probably why you thought you noticed a change. These days, I mix a lot of different techniques together.