Lee Byeong-heon, the Extreme Job director betting his dialogue on 90-second episodes

Lee Byeong-heon

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	July 23, 1980 Incheon, South Korea
Occupation	Film director and screenwriter
Known for	Extreme Job, Dream, Twenty
Awards	Udine Far East Film Festival Audience · Korea Best Star

Lee Byeong-heon makes comedy out of talk. His characters bicker over nothing, apologise badly and turn every embarrassment into a joke at their own expense, and the timing of those lines carries the laugh more than any situation does. Forbes Korea has a name for it: the “Lee Byeong-heon tone.” That tone filled Korean cinemas on a scale no local comedy had reached before. Now the director of Extreme Job is writing episodes that last less than two minutes, unlocked coin by coin on a phone, and his career has to answer whether the rhythm survives being cut into pieces.

He is not the actor. Korean coverage calls him “director Lee Byeong-heon” for a reason: he shares every character of his Hangul name, 이병헌, with Lee Byung-hun, the star of Squid Game, who is a decade older. The director comes from Incheon, the port city west of Seoul, and he came into film the slow way, through other people’s scripts.

Lee, born on July 23, 1980, got his first credit at twenty-eight, adapting the script of Scandal Makers, Kang Hyeong-cheol’s 2008 hit. He did the same job on Kang’s Sunny in 2011, then on Tazza: The Hidden Card, and wrote the screenplay for Love Forecast. His own films started small. Smell, a short about a young couple eating dinner in awkward silence until a smell fills the room that neither of them can ignore, won the prize for best Korean short at the Asiana International Short Film Festival. His first feature, Cheer Up Mr. Lee, follows a television crew documenting a would-be filmmaker. The Korean title, 힘내세요, 병헌씨, addresses that filmmaker by the director’s own given name, and the self-mockery became a habit he never dropped.

The breakthrough was Twenty, which he wrote and directed and NEW released in 2015. Kim Woo-bin, Lee Jun-ho and Kang Ha-neul play three friends who have just finished school and have no idea what comes next, and they talk the way people that age talk, fast and badly and mostly about girls. The film drew more than 1.1 million viewers on its opening weekend and close to three million in total. It earned him Best New Director nominations at the Baeksang, Blue Dragon and Grand Bell awards and a win from the Korea Film Actors Association. What a Man Wants, a romantic comedy set on Jeju with Lee Sung-min, Shin Ha-kyun and Song Ji-hyo, followed in 2018.

Then came the chicken. Extreme Job, released by CJ in January 2019, sends a failing narcotics squad led by Ryu Seung-ryong undercover in a fried-chicken shop across from a gang hideout, and the shop becomes a hit. It sold 16.26 million tickets, the most ever for a Korean comedy, and grossed about 139.6 billion won, the biggest box-office take of any Korean film for the next seven years. It also won the audience award at the Far East Film Festival in Udine and brought Lee Best Director nominations at the Blue Dragon and Buil awards.

Later that year he went to television with Be Melodramatic, which he co-wrote with Kim Young-young and co-directed for JTBC. He had started on it in 2015, after Twenty, because he wanted to tell the stories of people starting over after a relationship, and, as he put it, the material was “too much to spin in two hours.” Chun Woo-hee plays a screenwriter in her thirties who falls for her director, Ahn Jae-hong, and shares a house with friends played by Jeon Yeo-been and Han Ji-eun. Jang Beom-june’s song for the show, “Your Shampoo Scent in the Flowers,” was nominated for best soundtrack at the Mnet Asian Music Awards. The nationwide ratings never reached two percent.

That split runs through his whole career. His biggest hit is the one feature he did not originate: the screenplay for Extreme Job was Bae Se-young’s, and its gag engine is a plot. The projects that come from his own notebooks lean on conversation and earn far less. Dream, his story of a homeless football team bound for the Homeless World Cup, put Park Seo-joon and IU in front of the camera in 2020. The pandemic pushed the overseas shoot back to 2022, and when the film finally opened in April 2023 it sold 1.13 million tickets, about one fourteenth of what Extreme Job sold. The same year he was announced as director of Genie, Make a Wish, Kim Eun-sook’s Netflix fantasy. He later stepped down for personal reasons, and Ahn Gil-ho made the series. In its first full week it was Netflix’s most-watched non-English series.

Streaming has not settled the argument. Chicken Nugget, which he wrote and directed for Netflix from Park Ji-dok’s webtoon and released in March 2024, reunited him with Ryu Seung-ryong as a company boss whose daughter, Kim You-jung, steps into a strange machine and comes out a chicken nugget. Ahn Jae-hong plays the intern who loves her anyway. The South China Morning Post called it a surreal comedy that “may not be to everyone’s taste”; the series still reached Netflix’s global non-English top ten and was nominated for the International Emmy for best comedy in 2025.

In 2026 he chose the smallest screen. My Baby Daddy Is My Best Friend, released on February 4 on the Lezhin Snack app, runs 47 episodes of 90 to 120 seconds each. A young woman with an unplanned pregnancy asks an old friend whether he would be the child’s father. Lee wrote the script in about two months, leaned on Chopin for much of the music, and watched it reach number one on the platform. He told Forbes Korea that the slump in the film industry sent him there, and that he wanted to prove short-form could carry a real story instead of the dopamine loops of the Chinese apps. “A film usually has three acts,” he said. “Short-form felt like ten.” He also wants the money to be clear: directors and actors, he argued, need a visible revenue model to keep coming back. From May he also sat on the judging panel of ENA’s Director’s Arena, a contest for short-form drama directors. That same year, The King’s Warden passed 16.9 million admissions and took the box-office record Extreme Job had held since 2019.

According to Forbes Korea, Lee is writing a film, a drama and a stage play at the same time, and none has a title or a date yet. Whichever reaches an audience first will show whether his tone needs two hours, sixteen episodes or ninety seconds to work.

Featured Films

Tags: Korean cinema, Chun Woo-hee, Lee Byeong-heon, Ryu Seung-ryong, Be Melodramatic, Chicken Nugget

Related People

Featured Films

Related People

Discussion