Lee Min-ho, the K-drama prince who keeps trying to walk out of the palace

Lee Min-ho

Photo: K-POPIT 케이팝잇 / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 22, 1987 Seoul, South Korea
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy, Bounty Hunters, Gangnam Blues
Awards	2 Baeksang Award · KBS Drama · 3 SBS Drama Award, Top Excellence · Independent Spirit (shared)

In Hur Jin-ho’s The Assassin(s), Lee Min-ho plays Han Young-il, a rookie reporter standing at the edge of a story his superiors would prefer to keep out of print. The film is built around Yoo Hae-jin and Park Hae-il; Lee is the junior man in most of his scenes, and he has rarely looked more at ease on a screen. The thriller took the Chuseok holiday box office in Korea. For an actor coming off two expensive disappointments, it settled, for now, the question that has trailed him since his early twenties: whether the man who personified the K-drama prince could be anything else.

The career very nearly ended before it had begun. Lee, a Seoul native, was still doing small parts on television and studying film arts at Konkuk University when the car he was riding in with the actor Jung Il-woo was struck head-on by a vehicle fleeing an earlier accident. The two people in the front seats were killed. Lee broke his ribs, his thigh and an ankle, spent a month in a coma and months more in bed; a metal pin went into his thigh, and one leg was left shorter than the other.

What came next made his name at a speed few Korean actors have matched. In KBS2’s Boys Over Flowers, the Korean adaptation of Yoko Kamio’s manga, he played Gu Jun-pyo, the arrogant heir to a conglomerate who falls for a girl from a family-run dry cleaner’s. The series became a regional event in 2009, when Lee, born in Seoul on June 22, 1987, was 21, and it won him the Baeksang Arts Award for best new actor in television. It also fixed a template: rich, wounded, tall, softened by love. Producers would spend the next decade asking him to play it again.

SBS built its schedules around him. City Hunter, loosely drawn from Tsukasa Hojo’s manga, turned him into an action lead in 2011. The time-slip period drama Faith sent him back to the Goryeo court as the captain of a royal guard. Then Kim Eun-sook’s The Heirs, opposite Park Shin-hye, put him back in the blazer of a rich high-school boy, peaked at a 28.6 percent rating and passed a billion views on the Chinese platform iQIYI. All three brought him the network’s top excellence award.

Film was a harder market. Yoo Ha’s Gangnam Blues, his first lead in cinema, cast him as a young man from the slums dragged into the gang wars of the land rush that built southern Seoul, a deliberately grubby choice that earned him a Baeksang popularity prize. In China, where his following was enormous, the action comedy Bounty Hunters grossed about 31 million dollars. Back on television, The Legend of the Blue Sea paired him with Jun Ji-hyun as a con man in love with a mermaid. Then he disappeared for two years. Because of the injuries from the 2006 crash he was not fit for active duty, and he did his mandatory service as a public service worker at the Suseo Social Welfare Centre, from May 2017 until his discharge in April 2019.

His comeback, Kim Eun-sook’s The King: Eternal Monarch, set an SBS record for a Friday-Saturday premiere and then shed viewers week by week as its parallel-worlds plot thickened. Korean reviews were mixed. On Netflix it was the most popular Korean drama of 2020 in India, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore, and the second most popular in the United States.

That split is the story of Lee’s reputation. Outside Korea he is a phenomenon: the first Korean celebrity to pass 20 million followers on both Instagram and Facebook, a following no casting director in Seoul can ignore. Inside Korea, critics long treated him as a face first and an actor second, and the roles gave them little reason to revise the verdict. Heirs, a king, a guardsman, a charming swindler: the scripts kept asking him to be adored. The image was his most valuable asset and the clearest limit on what he was allowed to try.

The part that broke it came from Hollywood. In Soo Hugh’s adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s novel Pachinko for Apple TV+, Lee played Koh Hansu, a fish broker with yakuza connections who seduces the teenage Sunja, leaves her pregnant and then spends decades circling the family he refuses to claim. Speaking Korean and Japanese, all controlled menace and expensive suits, he used the old charm as the character’s weapon instead of his alibi. The cast shared the Independent Spirit Award for best ensemble in a new scripted series in 2023. The second season followed in 2024, and Apple has not ordered a third.

The first test after that came in 2025, and it went badly twice. tvN’s When the Stars Gossip, a romantic comedy set on a space station with Gong Hyo-jin, opened at 3.3 percent and fell to 1.84 percent by its fifth episode; its ending drew open hostility from viewers. That summer Kim Byung-woo’s Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy, the film of the hugely popular web novel, cast him as the regressor Yoo Joong-hyuk. It opened at number one, then lost its audience quickly and finished well short of what its budget required.

The Assassin(s) turns that around by giving him less to carry. Hur, the director of Christmas in August, sets the film in the aftermath of the Liberation Day shooting of 1974 that killed first lady Yuk Young-soo, and gives Lee’s reporter an older brother played by Jung Woo-sung. It had its world premiere in the Gala Presentations section of the Toronto International Film Festival on September 16 and opened in Korea a week later, on September 23. By September 30 it had sold 1.77 million tickets and taken 12.8 million dollars. It also drew accusations of distorting history, which Hur has dismissed as baseless.

Off screen, Lee’s sister co-founded and runs MYM Entertainment, the agency that represents him, and he executive-produces his own YouTube channel, leeminho film. In 2014 he launched PROMIZ, a fundraising platform, and gave 100 million won to UNICEF after the Nepal earthquake of 2015.

The next decision is already on his desk. In July, MYM confirmed that Lee was reviewing an offer to lead But Your Love, a twelve-episode romantic comedy from director Jang Young-seok in which he would play Cha Wook-hyun, a game-company director who is the most disliked boss in the building and, in secret, a member of a virtual idol group. If he signs, it will be a return to the genre that made him, and the first time he steps into it after proving, at 39, that he no longer needs it.