Lee Jae-wook, the Korean actor whose busiest year arrived while he was in the army

Lee Jae-wook

Photo: Saraa.kom / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 10, 1998 Seoul, South Korea
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Kill Boksoon, Battle of Jangsari
Awards	MBC Drama Awards · KBS Drama Awards · 2 Asia Artist Awards · Korea Drama Awards

The odd thing about Lee Jae-wook’s year is that he spent most of it somewhere else. While viewers watched him play a surgeon working off his military duty as a doctor on a remote island, the actor himself had already traded scripts for an Army training center, on active duty, with no alternative posting. When Netflix‘s horror comedy Dead-End Job reached the Busan International Film Festival, he climbed onstage during a leave, called it “a story that resembles our lives” and went back to his unit. The work keeps arriving while the man who made it is out of reach, and that gap is the real question of his career right now: whether a rise this fast can hold its shape through a long silence.

He grew up in Seoul and was studying theater and film at Chung-Ang University when the screen came for him early; he has been on a leave of absence from the course ever since. His first television job was small, a hacker-programmer named Marco Han in Memories of the Alhambra, the augmented-reality thriller led by Hyun Bin. Hyun Bin’s agency, VAST Entertainment, signed the newcomer almost immediately, and the industry treated him from that point as a face to watch rather than a supporting player to fill a slot.

Born on May 10, 1998, he moved fast. In 2019 he joined the main cast of tvN’s Search: WWW as Seol Ji-hwan, the younger love interest of Lee Da-hee’s character, and the magazine Cine21 saw sales of its rising-star issue jump on his account. The same autumn brought his film debut in the war drama The Battle of Jangsari and, more decisively, MBC’s Extraordinary You, in which he played Baek Kyung, the heroine’s arrogant childhood fiancé and the classic second lead who does not get the girl. Viewers took to him anyway. He won Best New Actor at the MBC Drama Awards that year and was nominated, without winning, for the same category at the Baeksang Arts Awards.

The first lead came quickly. In KBS2’s Do Do Sol Sol La La Sol, in 2020, he played Sunwoo Joon opposite Go Ara, a lighter role that showed he could carry warmth as well as the cool distance that had become his signature. It earned him the Excellence Award for an actor in a miniseries at the KBS Drama Awards and Rookie of the Year at the Asia Artist Awards. In 2021 he moved to C-JeS Entertainment and made a special appearance in Netflix’s Move to Heaven.

Then came Alchemy of Souls. The tvN fantasy, which premiered in June 2022, cast him as Jang Uk, an aristocrat’s son whose energy is blocked and who secretly trains with a feared assassin trapped in a servant’s body, played by Jung So-min. The series ran in two parts; the second, Alchemy of Souls: Light and Shadow, arrived that December with Go Youn-jung opposite him. It is the role that made him a lead international streaming audiences recognized by name, and it brought him the Best Actor prize at the Asia Artist Awards and a Global Excellence Award at the Korea Drama Awards.

What followed has been harder to read. In the Disney+ revenge thriller The Impossible Heir, in 2024, he played Han Tae-oh, the cold strategist son of a murderer who helps a childhood friend go after a conglomerate. In Netflix’s period mystery Dear Hongrang, in 2025, he was the heir who returns after twelve years with no memory, opposite Jo Bo-ah as the half-sister who doubts he is really her brother. The show leaned on that half-sibling tension for its romance, and the review site TheReviewGeek argued the device “could have definitely been replaced by some other plot device,” while faulting a story that crammed in too many subplots. The roles since Alchemy of Souls keep asking him for the same controlled stillness, and the scripts around it have not always been strong enough to make it count.

He has also learned how little private room the business leaves him. In February 2024 his relationship with Karina of the group aespa became public; on April 2 both agencies confirmed the couple had split, about five weeks later, amid reports of fierce fan pressure. His agency at the time said he wanted to concentrate on the project he was filming. Since June 2024 he has been represented by the new company Log Studio.

The recent stretch reads like a deliberate stockpile. KBS2’s weekend drama Last Summer, from November 2025, gave him his first dual role, as twin brothers, one of them the architect Baek Do-ha returning to his hometown, opposite Choi Sung-eun. On May 18, 2026, he enlisted for active-duty service in the Army, two weeks before ENA premiered Doctor on the Edge, in which he plays Do Ji-ui, a plastic surgeon serving as a public health doctor on an island. He sent a video message to the press conference instead of attending. The series, also on Disney+ internationally, opened at a 4.0 percent nationwide rating according to Nielsen Korea and finished its run on July 7 at its highest. On June 11 he released his first single album, Shadow, two tracks produced by Lim Seul-ong of 2AM.

Dead-End Job, released by Netflix on October 30, 2026, is the most exposed of these projects. He plays Byeon Hyeok-jun, a job seeker buried in debt who accepts part-time work paying fifty times the minimum wage, with a new nightmare waiting in every workplace. Kim Da-min directs, and Han Jun-hee, the filmmaker behind D.P., led the creative development. Early reviews split on the show’s mythology and its uneven effects, but they agree on him: Leisurebyte and Pixel Twelve both single out his frightened, comic lead as what keeps the series moving. He has said he tried not to make Hyeok-jun too brave, a small choice that suggests an actor more interested now in fear than in cool.

Netflix has not announced a second season. Han Jun-hee’s answer at the press conference was blunt: “Above all, people have to enjoy watching it for there to be a next one.” Active-duty service in the Army lasts eighteen months, which keeps Lee away from sets until late 2027. Until then the decision about what comes next belongs to viewers, and the work he banked before leaving is doing all the talking.