Stars of Korean hit TV show ‘Descendants’ marry in real life

Two South Korean stars who played lovers in a TV drama that took Asia by storm last year tied the knot in real life on Tuesday in a highly-anticipated wedding.

Actress Song Hye-Kyo, 35, and actor Song Joong-Ki, 32, who played the two leads in the military romance Descendants of the Sun, married in a star-studded ceremony in Seoul.

The drama tells the story of an army captain sent on a peacekeeping mission to a fictional war-torn country, Uruk, where he meets and falls in love with a surgeon working with a medical NGO.

It enjoyed huge popularity at home and across Asia, garnering billions of views on Chinese video-streaming sites and winning a thumbs-up from Thailand’s junta chief, who praised the main characters’ sense of duty.

The 16-episode series was hailed as reviving the so-called Hallyu, or Korean Wave, of K-pop and K-dramas that spread across Asia and beyond since the early 2000s.

The show also spawned a mini-industry, with Chinese fans snapping up cosmetics, clothes and fashion accessories favoured by the series’ stars and sold on online shopping sites.

Tuesday’s closed-door event featured a Who’s Who of the South Korean television industry as well as Zhang Ziyi, the award-winning Chinese actress who starred in the 2000 film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.