Lee Jung-jae built thirty years of Korean stardom. Then Squid Game arrived.

Lee Jung-jae

Photo: Rene "Ralph" Min / CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 15, 1972 Jung District, Seoul, South Korea
Occupation	Actor, Film Director
Known for	Along with the Gods: The Two Worlds, Along with the Gods: The Last 49 Days, Squid Game: Making Season 2
Awards	Emmy · SAG Award · Blue Dragon Film Award, Best Actor (1999) · Geumgwan Order of Cultural Merit, South Korea (2022)

When a show transforms its lead actor into a global phenomenon overnight, the danger is specific and predictable. The role that made you famous stops being a role and becomes a ceiling. Lee Jung-jae spent the years following Squid Game’s explosion doing something deliberate about that — directing a film, taking an English-language role in Star Wars, returning to romantic comedy after a decade away — as if to remind anyone paying attention that the ceiling he was given was not the one he intended to live under.

He was born in Seoul’s Jung District on December 15, 1972, and entered the entertainment industry through modeling before pivoting to acting in 1993. His face had the kind of stillness that Korean television required of its leading men, and the roles followed accordingly. What set him apart was an early instinct for restraint — a refusal to overperform that would become his signature. The 1995 drama Sandglass (모래시계) made him a national phenomenon not because his role was the largest but because of what he did when it wasn’t: scenes where he was simply present, watching, and the camera could not stop returning to him.

His film career took hold three years later. An Affair (정사, 1998) gave him his first adult, morally complex role — a man in a love triangle that Korean cinema treated with unusual directness. The following year, City of the Rising Sun (태양은 없다) earned him the Blue Dragon Film Award for Best Actor, the Korean film industry’s top prize, before his twenty-seventh birthday. He was, at that point, where his trajectory had predicted: South Korea’s foremost prestige leading man. What nobody anticipated was how long the next defining chapter would take.

The years between 2000 and 2011 produced a mixed record: commercial peaks — Oh! Brothers (2003) drew over three million admissions — and television projects that underperformed in ratings, and a sense that a career defined this early could calcify. The resurgence came in a concentrated burst. The Thieves (도둑들, 2012) — one of the highest-grossing Korean films ever made — reminded audiences what Lee could do in an ensemble. New World (신세계, 2013) went further: it placed him inside a dense, morally saturated crime epic where he played an undercover officer gradually losing his grip on which side of the line he actually stood. Assassination (암살, 2015) brought historical weight to match the commercial scale.

The reading of Lee Jung-jae that calcified through this period was, in retrospect, slightly too tidy. He had been cast as the embodiment of a particular Korean masculine gravity — composed, serious, bankable — and the industry had learned to deploy him accordingly. What this reading consistently missed was his range when the industry chose to use it. In The Face Reader (관상, 2013), he played a scheming royal with a precise menace entirely outside his usual terrain. In Chief of Staff (장관의 자리, 2019) on JTBC, he took on a career bureaucrat’s compromises with a specificity that critics had not always associated with him. The box the industry built was never quite as secure as it appeared.

The arrival of Squid Game in September 2021 made all prior questions about category and ceiling temporarily irrelevant. His performance as Seong Gi-hun — a cash-strapped, emotionally unsteady single father who stumbles into a death-match competition for the desperate — crossed the conventional lines between art-house and mainstream, between Korean product and global entertainment. At the 74th Primetime Emmy Awards in 2022, he won Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series, becoming the first Asian man to take that prize, and the first to win it for a non-English-language performance. The Screen Actors Guild Award followed. South Korea’s government awarded him the Geumgwan Order of Cultural Merit, the country’s highest cultural decoration.

What he did with the platform is the more revealing story. In 2022, Lee made his directorial debut with Hunt (헌트), a dense Cold War spy thriller set in 1980s Seoul that he also co-wrote and starred in. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in the Midnight Screenings section, where it received a standing ovation. In 2024, he took a supporting role as Sol in Star Wars: The Acolyte on Disney+, his first English-language performance, navigating a franchise whose register is entirely different from anything in his prior career. Neither choice was the obvious one for a man with an Emmy on his shelf.

For over a decade, Lee has been in a relationship with Im Se-ryung, a model and businesswoman from one of South Korea’s prominent families. He co-founded Artist Company, an entertainment management label, with his longtime friend Jung Woo-sung in 2016, and operates a small chain of Italian restaurants in Seoul that he designed himself. In November 2021, he became a global ambassador for Gucci, among the first Korean actors in that position.

Squid Game concluded in June 2025 with its third and final season, in which Gi-hun makes an irreversible final choice that closes the arc Lee spent five years inhabiting. On Amazon Prime Video, he is currently starring in Nice to Not Meet You — a romantic comedy opposite Lim Ji-yeon, a genre he has not worked in for years — playing an actor who has grown tired of the role that defined him. The next film, Ray, is in development. The question Lee Jung-jae’s career has always posed — not what success looks like, but what it costs and what it permits — did not end when the games stopped.

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Tags: actors, Korean cinema, Jung Woo-sung, Lee Jung-jae, Squid Game, Assassination

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