Kim Hye-yoon’s acting career takes off with first major TV role on ‘Sky Castle’

 For rookie actress Kim Hye-yoon, the TV drama sensation “Sky Castle” will go down in history as her critical career-making moment.

The character of Kang Ye-seo, an ambitious but psychologically fragile high school student, was the first major TV role she has played since her debut in 2013 as a teenager.

Ye-seo easily plays into the hands of the show’s villain, played by Kim Seo-hyung, a miserable professional coordinator for college admissions who is bent on manipulating and destroying rich, high-class parents and their children who would do anything to gain admission to the country’s top medical school.

Ye-seo and her mother, the show’s biggest role played by Yum Jung-ah, seek out the coordinator, but the mother tries to detach her daughter from the coordinator after finding out about her dubious intentions and background.

The girl fights her mother with vitriolic behavior and entirely relies on the coordinator to achieve her goal of going to the top medical school before she finally discovers her coordinator’s true nature.

The black comedy and thriller by the cable channel JTBC lays bare the cruelty and inhumanity of the country’s blind competition to go to prestigious universities, resonating widely with viewers.

The student role in “Sky Castle,” which recorded a viewer rating of 22.3 percent, a record high for any cable channel drama series, propelled Kim to becoming a household name.