Amazon Prime K-drama Tale of the Nine-Tailed 1938: Lee Dong-wook, Kim Bum reunite for action-packed return of hit fantasy series

Lee Dong-wook returns as the nine-tailed fox Lee Yeon and Kim Bum as his brother Lee Rang in Tale of the Nine-Tailed 1938, a story that sends Yeon back in time

In addition to its punchy action and sweeping mise-en-scene, the Korean drama series on Amazon Prime also benefits from strong chemistry between Lee and Kim

Reading Time:3 minutes

Lee Dong-wook as mythical nine-tailed fox, or gumiho, Lee Yeon in a still from “Tale of the Nine-Tailed 1938”. The new season of the Amazon Prime K-drama comes three years after the first season aired.

Published: 7:15pm, 11 May 2023

Lee Dong-wook, last seen in drama series Bad and Crazy, returns as the suave gumiho – a creature from Korean folklore also known as the “nine-tailed fox” – Lee Yeon in Tale of the Nine-Tailed 1938, three years after the first season of the popular show aired.

Kim Bum of Ghost Doctor is also back as Yeon’s half-brother Lee Rang, while The Penthouse’s Kim So-yeon steps up to play a new female lead, as the character played in the first series by Jo Bo-ah does not feature in the new timeline. Also joining the main cast is Ryoo Kyung-soo (Jung_E) as the series villain.

Although it takes place in the Japanese colonial era (1910-1945) in Japan, the series is not a prequel to 2020’s Tale of the Nine-Tailed. Rather, Yeon is compelled in the present to follow a mysterious masked villain through a portal into the past, where he has 16 hours to retrieve a stone that keeps the gate between the mortal Earth and the world of demons firmly under lock and key.

It does not take Yeon too long to track down the stone, but a major distraction looms when he bumps into his half-brother Rang – the Rang from 1938, that is. The one from his own timeline perished at the end of the last season.

The 1938 Rang hates Yeon – much of the first Tale of the Nine-Tailed was devoted to the brothers going from being enemies to BFFs – so their reunion in Japanese-occupied Korea proves an awkward one. Rang wants to kill Yeon, while Yeon just wants to give his younger brother a hug.