Actor Kim Hye-soo quietly paid tuition for 15 junior colleagues

Actor Kim Hye-soo has been quietly paying tuition for 15 junior actors, including Ha Ji-young, it has emerged.

A video featuring Ha Ha, Kim Won-hyo and Ha Ji-young was posted Wednesday on the YouTube channel "YouTube Ha Ji-young," in which the three spoke candidly about their careers and personal relationships in the entertainment industry.

During the conversation, Ha Ji-young named Kim Hye-soo as someone she was most grateful to in her career.

Ha said she had recently come across YouTube videos with titles along the lines of "the celebrity Kim Hye-soo has been supporting for 17 years."

"After 'Late Night TV Entertainment' ended, I was thinking about quitting the business," Ha said. "I was studying on my own when I got a message from Kim Hye-soo saying, 'There's this lecture — what do you think about checking it out?' It was a course on film and music, and I loved it, so I signed up. But it turned out that Kim Hye-soo had paid the tuition for about 15 students upfront, before the course even started."

Kim Won-hyo also shared a memory involving Kim Hye-soo, drawing laughs from the group. "In 'Kick the Moon,' there's a scene on the beach where gangsters carry someone on their shoulders, and I was Kim Hye-soo's right leg," he said. "But when the film came out, it wasn't me anymore — I was too slim at the time, so they replaced me with another actor. Back then, the competition among bit-part players to grab Kim Hye-soo's leg was fierce."