Lee Sung-jae, the Public Enemy villain who still wants to play the lover

Lee Sung-jae

Photo: Martin Kraft / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 23, 1970 Yongsan-gu, Seoul, South Korea
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Barking Dogs Never Bite, Carter, Daisy
Awards	Blue Dragon Award · Grand Bell Award · Baeksang Award · Korean Association of Film Critics · KBS Drama

Lee Sung-jae has said more than once that what he would really like to make is a love story. It is an odd wish from the actor who gave Korean cinema one of its coldest killers, a polished fund manager in Public Enemy who murders his own parents, and who carried the first feature Bong Joon Ho ever directed. It is odder given where the last fifteen years have taken him: into television, as husbands, fathers, prosecutors and a Joseon king. His next part is another husband, a boxing coach whose wife announces she is going to university. The young romantic lead who began opposite Shim Eun-ha has since been cast as almost everything except the lover.

He grew up in Seoul’s Yongsan district and studied theatre and film at Dongguk University, where he was class representative and counted Go Hyun-jung and Lee Mi-yeon among his classmates. He entered television through MBC’s open recruitment of new actors and worked in supporting parts until the KBS drama Lie brought him that network’s prize for best new actor.

The film that changed his standing arrived in December 1998, the same year as Lie, when he was 28. In Lee Jeong-hyang’s Art Museum by the Zoo he played Chul-su, a soldier on leave who finds his girlfriend’s flat occupied by a stranger, played by Shim Eun-ha, and ends up writing a screenplay with her out of their own experiences of love. The performance won him best new actor at the Blue Dragon, Grand Bell, Baeksang, Chunsa and Korean Association of Film Critics awards in 1999. Within months he was the leader of four bored thugs, nicknamed No Mark, in Kim Sang-jin’s Attack the Gas Station!, one of the biggest box-office hits of the late 1990s.

The next choice looks more interesting now than it did then. In Barking Dogs Never Bite, released in February 2000, he played Ko Yun-ju, an unemployed academic so maddened by the barking in his apartment block that he starts abducting the dogs, opposite Bae Doona. It was Bong Joon Ho’s debut. Two decades later, on KBS radio, Lee called Bong “the one who has done best of all the directors I’ve worked with” and joked that it was about time he called: “I’m waiting.” He went back to Kim Sang-jin for the comedy Kick the Moon in 2001, with Cha Seung-won and Kim Hye-soo.

Then came the role that stuck. In Kang Woo-suk’s Public Enemy, released in January 2002, Sul Kyung-gu played a rule-bending detective and Lee played Jo Kyu-hwan, the polished fund manager who murders his own parents. The film drew almost three million admissions. It was his first villain, and it had a price: the director warned him that advertisers would stay away for years, and they did. “My father brought ten of his friends and told me never to play a role like that again,” he recalled. “It hurt.” He would play another villain, he has said, “but I want to make melodramas.”

That is where the story gets less flattering. The leading roles of the following years never matched the weight of Jo Kyu-hwan. Ice Rain made him a mountaineer and Dance with the Wind a ballroom dancer; in Andrew Lau’s Daisy he was the Interpol detective, billed third behind Jun Ji-hyun and Jung Woo-sung. Holiday, in which he played a version of Ji Kang-heon, the escaped convict whose 1988 hostage standoff in Seoul made famous the cry that the rich go free and the poor go to prison, was the most serious of them. Natalie, sold as Korea’s first 3D feature, with Lee as a sculptor, got a review in The Korea Times headlined “Expensive 3D effects for cheap melodrama”. The romantic lead he kept reaching for was always the weaker half of his range. He blames part of that on the industry, envying Hollywood, where a man of seventy can still play opposite an actress in her forties; in Korea, he said, that gets written as an affair. The complaint has a point, but it ignores that his strongest work came from men who believe they are the reasonable one in the room.

Television understood this sooner than cinema did. Since the early 2010s he has worked mostly there: the cable hit How Long I’ve Kissed, the ruthlessly ambitious Jo Gwan-woong in Gu Family Book, King Seonjo in The King’s Face, and supporting turns in Abyss and Diary of a Prosecutor. In 2013 he was in the founding cast of the MBC reality show I Live Alone, which showed him as a “goose father”, the Korean term for a man who stays home working while his family studies abroad. He did it, he said later, to show his daughters in Canada how their father was living, and he left the show around the turn of the following year.

His return to film has come through Netflix. After a part in Kim Ki-duk’s Human, Space, Time and Human, shown at the Berlinale in 2018, he played General Kim Jong-hyeok in Jung Byung-gil’s Carter in 2022, the North Korean officer who welcomes the amnesiac agent and then turns on him to stage a coup. MCM’s review found him “better when he is quiet than when the plot needs him to be a villain on a schedule”, a fair summary of how he has been used for twenty years. Around it he has kept working in television, opposite Song Yoon-ah in Show Window: The Queen’s House and in the TV Chosun drama Red Balloon, and made a brief appearance in 2025 in the JTBC series The Art of Negotiation as the senior who helps Lee Je-hoon’s character.

He married Kim Jin-sook in 1996, and the couple have two daughters; the family moved to Canada around 2010, and in 2020 he said the separation had lasted a decade and that he had never once fallen behind on sending money home. He became a grandfather in 2019.

KBS confirmed on 13 October 2026 that he will play Kang Ji-cheol in I Went to School, a weekend series written by Yang Hee-seung, due in the first half of 2027. Kang is a former boxer whose luck ran out and who now runs a gym; his wife, played by Lee Jung-eun, decides late in life to go to university, and the decision upends his settled routine. It will be his first KBS weekend drama, a format that runs for the better part of a year. It is a marriage story rather than the love story he keeps asking for, and probably as close as Korean television will come to granting the wish.