Park Jin-young, the GOT7 voice that K-drama keeps borrowing

Park Jin-young

Photo: Jinius / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 22, 1994 Changwon, South Korea
Occupation	Singer, songwriter, actor
Known for	Yaksha: Ruthless Operations, Hi-Five

On Saturday nights this autumn, Park Jin-young walks into Korea’s colonial past as a man with two names. In 100 Days of Deception he is Kim Tae-woong, who answers to Sato Hideo inside the Japanese Government-General and whose wallet is lifted at Gyeongseong Station by Kim You-jung‘s pickpocket. Not long before the drama arrived, he put out Said & Done, a record whose lead single carries his own lyrics. GOT7 fans know him as one of the group’s vocalists and one of its writers. Drama audiences know him as the boy the Korean press has crowned a “first-love icon.” The second identity keeps eating the calendar of the first, and his solo catalogue, two EPs and a handful of singles, reads like the minutes of that negotiation.

He is not, to settle the obvious confusion, J.Y. Park, the singer who founded JYP Entertainment and shares his Korean name, 박진영, syllable for syllable. This Park Jin-young grew up in the Jinhae district of Changwon, on the south coast, where he was born on 22 September 1994; his family’s roots are on Udo, a small island off the district. He started dancing in Busan in his first year of middle school, reached the final preliminary round of an SM Entertainment audition as a child, and in 2009 took first place at a JYP open audition alongside Jay B, the future GOT7 leader. Then he moved to Seoul.

Acting came first, almost as a quirk of scheduling. Before any group debut, KBS cast him as Jung Ui-bong in Dream High 2, and he sang “We Are the B” on its soundtrack. The same year he and Jay B debuted as the duo JJ Project with the single album Bounce. GOT7 followed in January 2014 with the EP Got It?, and for his first years he was billed as Jr., then Junior, because the man who ran his label, J.Y. Park, carried exactly the same name. Only later did he settle on Jinyoung.

Through the JYP years the two careers ran side by side. He played the teenage version of Lee Min-ho‘s character in The Legend of the Blue Sea, carried the independent film A Stray Goat, and landed his first drama lead in He Is Psychometric. In January 2021 all seven members declined to renew their JYP contracts. Jinyoung signed with BH Entertainment, an agency built around actors rather than idols, and the move said plainly where his weight was shifting. His first solo single, “Dive,” still came out that July, and the band refused to dissolve: GOT7’s self-titled EP in 2022 was its first release made independently of the label that formed it.

The screen work compounded quickly. The Devil Judge and the role of Yoo Ba-bi in Yumi’s Cells made him a romantic lead. The film Christmas Carol, in which he plays identical twins, one of whom gets himself locked in a juvenile detention camp to avenge the other’s death, won him Best New Actor (Film) at the Baeksang Arts Awards in 2023, along with the same prize from the Korean Association of Film Critics.

The music answer arrived in January 2023 with Chapter 0: With, five songs whose lyrics he wrote alone and four of which he co-composed. The title track, “Cotton Candy,” builds a whole romance on one sugary metaphor, and the EP reached No. 9 on the Circle Album Chart. Four months later he enlisted, serving in the army’s 11th Maneuver Division until November 2024. The title promised a series. No first chapter came after it.

That gap is what the fan narrative tends to skip. Measured against his screen record, the solo catalogue is thin: two EPs in more than a decade as a professional, released three years apart, each squeezed between shoots. The “first-love” tag sells his dramas and quietly frames his songs, which mostly arrive as love songs by the man who plays the first love. On screen he has fought the typecasting, from the vengeful twin of Christmas Carol to the cult leader of the 2025 film Hi-Five, his first outright villain, which brought a Best New Actor nomination at the Blue Dragon Film Awards, where he also collected a Popular Star Award. His records have not yet taken a comparable risk. Said & Done reaches into jazzy brass R&B and dream pop, but its argument is still that love outlasts everything else.

After his discharge he picked up both lines at once. GOT7 reunited for Winter Heptagon in January 2025, and he worked on its ballad “Her.” In tvN’s Our Unwritten Seoul, opposite Park Bo-young, he played Lee Ho-soo, a lawyer who lost the hearing in his left ear in the accident that killed his father, a part he has said depended on playing the impairment naturally, almost as a habit. It brought him a nomination for Best Actor in television at the 2026 Baeksang Arts Awards. In December 2025 he co-wrote the lyrics of the single “Christmas Fever.”

2026 has been the busiest year of his career. JTBC’s ten-episode romance Still Shining, in which he plays Yeon Tae-seo, a subway driver who runs into his teenage first love, Kim Min-ju’s Mo Eun-a, reached seventh place on Netflix‘s global top ten for non-English shows. Said & Done followed on 13 May: six tracks, among them “Seventeen” with DAY6’s Wonpil and “Unrequited Love” featuring Choi Yuri, with “Everlove” as the lead single. Hanteo counted 34,621 copies sold in its first week, above the 30,586 of his debut EP and a personal best.

100 Days of Deception, a period spy romance set in Gyeongseong in 1932 and made for tvN’s 20th anniversary, premiered on 10 October and runs 16 episodes on weekends until 29 November, streaming on TVING in Korea and on Netflix worldwide. His Tae-woong is the adopted son of the second-highest official in the colonial administration, a man who, by the show’s own design, may not be what his father believes. The part suits someone who has spent more than a decade working in two registers. What his next record has to prove is that the singer can stop arriving second.

Tags: singers, K-pop, 100 Days of Deception, Park Jin-young, Chapter 0: With, GOT7

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