Kim Junsu

He debuted as TVXQ's main vocalist, and when TV shut its doors on him, he crossed over to musical theatre and became its biggest ticket seller. On stage he goes by XIA.

Born in December 1986 in Goyang, just outside Seoul, he's the younger of fraternal twins. In sixth grade he started a dance crew with a neighborhood friend that got written up in the local paper. That friend? Eunhyuk of Super Junior. Junsu trained at SM Entertainment from 1998 for more than five and a half years before debuting with TVXQ in December 2003. He picked the stage name Xiah himself, meaning star of Asia. The label had planned him as the sexy, brooding one, but one flower-pose under his chin on an early cable show turned him into Angel Xiah for good. At one point his fan cafe had more members than any other idol's.

His weapon is the voice: husky, layered, weirdly resonant. He was known for live vocals that didn't wobble even mid-choreo, and there's a clip fans still pass around where every member's in-ear monitor dies and Junsu is the one keeping everyone on the beat. In an early range battle he hit a high A in the fourth octave (falsetto included) and won. He can dance too. In 2006, when U-Know Yunho was hurt in a drink-poisoning attack and couldn't perform, Junsu took over his solo dance break. He once said he'd rather be praised for dancing than singing.

In July 2009 he, Kim Jae-joong and Park Yoo-chun sued SM over what they called an unfair contract and left the group. That contract lawsuit turned TVXQ into a duo of Yunho and Max Changmin, while the three formed JYJ in 2010. Then came the weird part. Their albums sold, yet JYJ barely showed up on music shows or variety TV. A later broadcasting-law amendment aimed at stopping that kind of appearance blocking was nicknamed the JYJ Law.

His way out was musical theatre. He debuted in Mozart! in January 2010 after composer Sylvester Levay auditioned him personally and argued that Mozart may have been the idol of his era. His very first run sold out every seat of the roughly 3,000-seat Sejong Center, and two years later he won Best Actor at the Korea Musical Awards for playing Death in Elisabeth. He's the name at the front of the whole idols-in-theatre story, the guy who flipped the idol-actor stigma on skill alone.

Every signature role comes with its own nickname. His red-haired Dracula from 2014, aka Syacula, got composer Frank Wildhorn saying he changed how Dracula is played, and Junsu has done every season since the premiere. As L in Death Note he spent most of the show barefoot, his feet constantly scraped up, and set a record of 57 straight sold-out shows as the only cast. In 2025 he tried comedy for the first time with Beetlejuice and became the first winner of the Baeksang Arts Awards' new musical acting prize.

He did his military service as a conscripted police officer from February 2017 to November 2018. Meanwhile fans ran XIA of the Month, voting on two deep cuts every month and streaming them up the charts. As a solo singer he's kept releasing since his 2012 debut album Tarantallegra and has lent his voice to drama OSTs like Descendants of the Sun. In 2020 he returned to network variety for the first time in a decade alongside Park Myung-soo, then sat on the judging panel of Mr. Trot. In 2021 he launched his own agency, Palmtree Island, and became its CEO.

His official fandom name is COCONUT and the lightstick is the Coco-bong. The concert highlight is Genie Time, where he grants fans' wishes on the spot. It started in Japan because long conversations in Japanese were tough for him. He's changed his hair color close to 30 times, so fans can date any photo by the shade. He paid out of pocket to build a school in Cambodia, known locally as the Kim Junsu School, and for his 20th anniversary in 2024 he shared a stage again with Jae-joong as the project duo JX.