Lee Jong-suk, the actor who first turned down the prince he now plays on Disney+

Lee Jong-suk

Photo: Elephant Factory / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 14, 1989 Suwon, South Korea
Occupation	Actor
Known for	The Witch: Part 2. The Other One, V.I.P., Hot Young Bloods
Awards	KBS Drama Awards Best New Actor (shared) · Grimae · Baeksang Award · Korea Drama Awards Top Excellence · 2 MBC Drama Awards Grand Prize (Daesang)

The prince of the Western Kingdom is written as a man so beautiful that whoever meets his eyes might faint, and that line is why Lee Jong-suk first said no. He knew the webtoon behind Disney+’s The Remarried Empress, knew how many readers had already cast Heinrey in their heads, and decided the part belonged to someone better looking. The director, Jo Soo-won, talked him round. So the actor Korean television has spent years casting for his face is now playing the one role defined entirely by it.

He told the story on the YouTube talk show Salon Drip in the week the series launched, and added a second confession. After a supporting part in The Face Reader he had sworn off period dramas, convinced that, standing in costume next to senior actors, he broke the emotional flow of every scene. Asked whether that vow had been rash, he agreed it had, and said the fans wanted him to try one. An actor who keeps measuring himself against his own looks is an odd fit for a career built on them. That friction runs through most of what he has made.

Suwon, just south of Seoul, is where he was born on 14 September 1989, the eldest of three children; he grew up in neighbouring Yongin. In middle school a traffic accident tore a cruciate ligament and ended years of taekwondo. Stuck at home through six months of rehabilitation, he watched actors on television and decided to become one. A street scout then signed him to what turned out to be a modelling agency, and at 15 he walked the Seoul Collection runway, the youngest male model ever to debut there.

Acting came through the broadcaster SBS, where the director Jin Hyuk noticed him and cast him in Prosecutor Princess in 2010. The same year he played a gifted, prickly young composer in Secret Garden, the hit that first made viewers ask his name. He enrolled at Konkuk University to study film, finishing in 2016, and broke out in the KBS teen drama School 2013 as a student carrying a buried history. It brought him the network’s best new actor prize, shared with Lee Hee-joon.

The run that followed was unusually steady. In I Can Hear Your Voice, opposite Lee Bo-young, he played a young man who reads minds; in Doctor Stranger, a North Korean defector working as a surgeon in Seoul; in Pinocchio, with Park Shin-hye, a rookie television reporter whose own family had been destroyed by a careless news story. Pinocchio earned him the Most Popular Actor award at the Baeksang Arts Awards. Then came W, the MBC fantasy opposite Han Hyo-joo in which he played the hero of a webtoon who discovers he is a drawing. It won him the Daesang, the grand prize of the 2016 MBC Drama Awards, at 27.

He kept to the formula and the formula kept working. While You Were Sleeping, with Bae Suzy, cast him as a young prosecutor and put him on the shortlist for the SBS grand prize, which he did not win. Romance Is a Bonus Book, opposite Lee Na-young, made him a star writer and editor at a publishing house. In March 2019 he began his military service, assigned to public service duty because of the knee he had wrecked as a teenager, and he was discharged in January 2021.

The big screen tells a thinner story, and his choices there read as attempts to break the image. The Face Reader was a box-office hit, but he was a supporting player in it, and by his own account a misfit. In Park Hoon-jung’s V.I.P. he took his first lead villain, a serial killer shielded by his father’s rank in the North Korean elite, and in Decibel he was the bomber hunting a former naval commander played by Kim Rae-won. Neither film changed how the industry saw him. Television did the defining, and television mostly asked for the same thing: the clean-cut lead whose face could hold the last close-up of a romance. Whether his range has ever been tested as hard as his looks is a fair question, and one his own doubts keep raising.

The comeback was Big Mouth, MBC’s 2022 thriller with Im Yoon-ah, in which he played a lawyer with a dismal win rate who is mistaken for a notorious con artist. It brought a second MBC grand prize. In his acceptance speech he thanked someone he did not name, saying he had liked that person very much for a very long time. The next day he and the singer and actress IU confirmed they were a couple. They had met in 2012 as co-hosts of the SBS music show Inkigayo. In July 2026 both agencies confirmed that the relationship was over, and his agency, Ace Factory, said the two had decided to remain good colleagues.

Before that, in the summer of 2025, he returned in tvN’s Law and the City, a weekend drama about the associate lawyers who keep Seoul’s Seocho-dong court district running, opposite Moon Ga-young. He played Ahn Ju-hyeong, a veteran associate rather than a star litigator, and the ratings climbed through its run. It was the least glamorous part he had taken in a decade, and the Korean press singled out the precision of his delivery.

The Remarried Empress is the opposite bet. Adapted from the Naver webtoon, it casts Shin Min-a as Empress Navier, who agrees to divorce Emperor Sovieshu, played by Ju Ji-hoon, on condition that she may marry Lee’s Heinrey. Lee Se-young plays Rashta, the runaway slave who comes between them. The series had its world premiere in the On Screen section of the Busan International Film Festival in October 2026 and arrived on Disney+ on 3 November, a day earlier than planned. According to Disney, it became the most viewed local original premiere ever on Disney+ and Hulu over its first three days. For the New Year ball scene, he said, he practised the waltz for about two months.

The final episodes run until 25 November. After that, the next project is unconfirmed: in May 2026 Ace Factory said only that he was reviewing an offer for Paradise, a mystery drama from writer Kim Su-jin and director Oh Choong-hwan, who made While You Were Sleeping and Big Mouth with him. And the period drama he once ruled out is, by his own account, now something he means to do.