Ju Ji-hoon, the actor who turned down The Remarried Empress before becoming its emperor

Ju Ji-hoon

Photo: TV10 / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 16, 1982 Gangdong District, Seoul, South Korea
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Along with the Gods: The Two Worlds, Along with the Gods: The Last 49 Days, Project Silence
Awards	Baeksang Award · Blue Dragon Award · Chunsa Film Art · Buil Film · Korean Association of Film Critics · MBC Drama

Before he said a word about his career on a Busan stage, Ju Ji-hoon apologised for his cold. Then he confessed that he had turned down The Remarried Empress two or three times. He did not understand that world well enough, he told the film festival’s Actors’ House, until someone he trusts wrote him a letter and he grew curious about why so many readers loved the original. The part he finally took is Sovieshu, the emperor who divorces a flawless empress for a runaway slave, the man the whole story is built to resent. It suits him. Ju was introduced to Asia as a sulking crown prince, lost that version of himself in a courtroom, and rebuilt his name on men who are allowed to be cold, compromised or frightening. What the next few months will show is whether the face that first sold him can return without undoing the work that replaced it.

The face came first. Ju was born in Seoul’s Gangdong District and studied acting at Kyonggi University, but the work that paid early was modelling. In his early twenties he fronted campaigns for Calvin Klein, Levi’s and Reebok and collected bit parts on television, waiting, like most models of that decade, for a director to need him.

The call came with Princess Hours, MBC’s adaptation of the manhwa Goong, set in an alternate Korea that had kept its monarchy. Ju, born in May 1982 and twenty-three when it aired, played Crown Prince Lee Shin, a teenager of folded arms and withheld sentences, married off to a commoner. The series peaked at a 28.3% rating at home, travelled across Asia and won him MBC’s best new actor award. The revenge drama The Devil, opposite Shin Min-a, followed, then film: Antique, Min Kyu-dong’s version of the Japanese manga Antique Bakery, was invited to the Berlin International Film Festival.

Then it stopped. In April 2009 he was indicted, without detention, alongside more than a dozen others in an ecstasy investigation, and that June he pleaded guilty to using ecstasy and ketamine. The court gave him a six-month prison term suspended for a year and 120 hours of community service. The judge cited his clean record, his remorse and the petitions fans had sent from Korea and abroad. He enlisted for military service in February 2010 and was discharged in November 2011.

That ruling is the part of the story the redemption narrative tends to skip. His second career is usually told as a lesson in craft, and the roles were hard. But the sentence that kept a prison term suspended was shaped in part by the same overseas fandom that Princess Hours had built, the audience he then spent a decade working away from. Nor did the reinvention fully escape type. A run of his best-known characters, from a lawyer for the top one per cent to a surgeon who arrives to take over a failing department, share the same arrogance, and by his own account at Busan, he never avoided romance on purpose; it simply drifted away from the work he was offered. An actor, he said, is someone who has to be of use, more than someone who follows his own feelings.

The way back began with an echo of the old image. I Am the King gave him a dual role as the young prince who would become King Sejong and the slave who trades places with him, and the melodramas Five Fingers and Mask kept him on television. Cinema made the turn. Kim Sung-su’s noir Asura: The City of Madness took him to the Toronto International Film Festival, and two years later he was everywhere at once. In Kim Yong-hwa’s two-part Along with the Gods: The Two Worlds and Along with the Gods: The Last 49 Days he played Haewonmaek, the youngest and most sarcastic of three afterlife guardians, and both films passed ten million admissions in Korea. In Yoon Jong-bin’s The Spy Gone North he was Jung Moo-taek, the North Korean State Security Department officer who tries to buy military secrets from the South’s undercover agent, which earned him best supporting actor prizes at the Buil Film Awards and from the Korean Association of Film Critics. In Dark Figure of Crime, speaking Busan dialect opposite Kim Yun-seok, he was a killer feeding a detective confessions to murders nobody had reported, which won him best actor at the Chunsa Film Art Awards.

Streaming then handed him a crown again, this time in a plague. Kingdom, Netflix‘s first original Korean series, cast him as Lee Chang, a Joseon crown prince investigating his father’s mysterious illness while the dead rise around him, and it carried his name far beyond the markets that remembered Lee Shin. On network television, Hyena paired him with Kim Hye-soo as rival lawyers serving the very rich and earned him SBS’s top excellence award.

Then came volume. The Disney+ thriller Blood Free, the Cannes-premiered disaster film Project Silence, the romantic comedy Love Your Enemy and Kang Full’s horror series Light Shop all reached audiences within a single year. The role that consolidated it came next: Baek Kang-hyuk in Netflix’s The Trauma Code: Heroes on Call, a trauma surgeon back from war zones and sent to revive a team that exists only on paper. It won him best actor for television at the 61st Baeksang Arts Awards and at the Blue Dragon Series Awards. This spring he followed it with Climax, a political noir on ENA in which he played prosecutor Bang Tae-seop opposite Ha Ji-won; it opened with the channel’s second-highest drama premiere rating and closed in April at a series-best 4.8%.

At Busan he said he had wrapped Buy King, a drama about a succession war inside one of Korea’s richest families directed by Jo Sung-hee, about ten days earlier, and that he was preparing to shoot the second season of The Trauma Code, which Netflix is now producing together with a third.

First, though, comes the emperor. The Remarried Empress, adapted from Alphatart’s Naver webtoon and directed by Cho Su-won, screened three episodes in Busan and opens on Disney+, and on Hulu in the United States, on 4 November, with four episodes followed by two a week until the finale on 25 November. Shin Min-a plays Navier, the empress he discards, nearly two decades after The Devil first put them on screen together. Ju says his resistance broke down at the first table read, once he decided to play it less like realism and more like a musical. The prince who made his name refusing to smile is now an emperor the audience is meant to blame, and he has had a long rehearsal for that.

Featured Films

Tags: actors, Ju Ji-hoon, The Trauma Code: Heroes on Call, Kingdom, South Korean cinema, Ha Ji-won

Related People

Han So-hee

Ji Chang-wook

Jo Jung-suk

Kim Soo-hyun

Zo In-sung

Billie Piper