Two things happened to Joo Woo-jae at the 5th Blue Dragon Series Awards. He won a trophy. And then he got digitally erased from a photograph by Kim Sook.
Both events are documented. On 1 August 2026, Joo Woo-jae posted a picture of himself with Byeon Woo-seok from the ceremony, and the caption was not the throwaway kind.
- Joo Woo-jae posted a photo with Byeon Woo-seok from the 5th Blue Dragon Series Awards on 1 August 2026
- Both actors won awards at the ceremony
- His caption looked back on meeting as struggling models in their twenties
- Kim Sook joked she used AI to crop Joo Woo-jae out of a selfie he photobombed
- The two have been friends for over ten years, from runway work to television
The caption
He wrote about their twenties. Specifically, about meeting Byeon Woo-seok back when they were both fashion models — not established ones, the other kind. The kind who go to a lot of castings and book very few of them.
Then he said what standing next to that same person at an awards show now feels like.
It's a good post because of the gap it's describing. Not "we made it," exactly. More like: the guy you used to be broke with is here, and he also won something, and neither of you planned for that.
Meanwhile, Kim Sook was trying to take a photo
The other story from the night is considerably less sentimental.
Kim Sook wanted a selfie with Byeon Woo-seok. Just the two of them. Joo Woo-jae, uninvited, inserted himself into the frame.
Her response was to announce publicly that she had used AI editing to remove him from the picture entirely. Cropped out. Gone.
It's a joke, obviously. It's also the funniest thing anyone said that evening, and it did more numbers online than most of the actual red carpet.
Ten years of this
The friendship goes back more than a decade and it started on the runway, which is the detail people tend to forget about Byeon Woo-seok. Before the acting career, he was a model. So was Joo Woo-jae. They came up in the same industry, at the same time, at the same level.
These days they're both on television, and the dynamic hasn't changed much. On Hangout with Yoo they mostly antagonise each other. Byeon Woo-seok has claimed on air that they drifted apart because Joo Woo-jae kept stealing his clothes — a grievance that is either entirely fabricated or completely true, and honestly either would fit.
Underneath the bit, though, they show up for each other. Joo Woo-jae has been loudly supportive of The Wife of the 21st Century Grand Duke, the drama that turned into Byeon Woo-seok's biggest hit to date.
Which is roughly the shape of every long friendship between two men who met in their twenties. Relentless mockery in public. Genuine pride when it counts. A photobomb at an awards show, and a paragraph the next morning about how much it meant to be there.
