Background and career
Lee Jung-jae (Korean: 이정재; born December 15, 1972) is a South Korean actor, filmmaker, and businessman. Considered one of South Korea's most successful actors, he has received numerous accolades, including a Primetime Emmy Award, an Actor Award, a Critics' Choice Television Award, six Baeksang Arts Awards, in addition to nominations for a Golden Globe Award and a Gotham Award. Lee is also a businessman who has launched a restaurant chain in Seoul and founded several companies, including the development firm Seorim C&D, some of which he co-owns with Jung Woo-sung. Lee started his career as a fashion model, and gained popularity for his role in television drama Sandglass (1995). After his breakthrough in An Affair (1998), Lee's film career took off. He has starred in dramas such as City of the Rising Sun (1999), romantic films Il Mare (2000) and Last Present (2001), comedies such as Oh! Brothers (2003), action films Typhoon (2005) and Deliver Us from Evil (2020), thrillers The Housemaid (2010) and New World (2013), heist film The Thieves (2012), and espionage films Assassination (2015), Operation Chromite (2016) and Hunt (2022). He won Best Supporting Actor at the 50th Baeksang Arts Awards for his role in The Face Reader (2013). In 2021, Lee gained international fame for his role as Seong Gi-hun of Netflix's Squid Game. For his performance in the show's first season, he was nominated for numerous accolades, including the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Actor in a Drama Series, the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Television Series Drama, the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series and the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Drama Series, making him the first male actor from Asia to receive individual nominations in those categories across all four awards shows, with his win for the latter two also making history. His season 2 and 3 portrayals received mixed reviews. In December 2021, he was selected as Gallup Korea's Film Actor of the Year. In 2022, Lee was awarded the Geumgwan (1st Class) Order of Cultural Merit, the highest decoration awarded to those who have contributed to South Korean culture and arts.
Lee Jung-jae was born on December 15, 1972, in the Jung District of Seoul. He enrolled at Dongguk University, and was awarded his master's degree from the university's Department of Theater & Film Art in the Graduate School of Cultural Arts, in August 2008. He made his first foray into theater in December of that same year, taking on the titular role in Hamlet in Water. The play ran for four days at his alma mater's Lee Hae-rang Theater.
Lee was discovered by designer Ha Yong-soo while he was working at a café in Apgujeong-dong (located in the Gangnam District), then worked as a fashion model for a number of years. Upon making his acting debut with the 1993 TV drama Dinosaur Teacher, Lee became a star practically overnight, and was almost always cast in lead roles thereafter. A year later, he received favorable reviews for his first big screen role in Bae Chang-ho's The Young Man, but it was the 1994 hit campus drama Feelings that made him a household name. In 1995, what was supposed to be a small supporting role as the heroine's silent, devoted bodyguard in ratings behemoth Sandglass turned Lee into a national heartthrob, such that his screen time was increased throughout the series' run. However, that success would be cut short because shortly after, he would be called up for National Service. In 1997, following his return from the military, his career went into a slight decline. It was then he decided to return to acting school by enrolling into Dongguk University's Department of Theatre & Film. Lee's acting breakthrough would come in late 1998 in the award-winning film An Affair by E J-yong. This was followed up by another success, City of the Rising Sun, for which he won Best Actor at the Blue Dragon Film Awards and the Korean Association of Film Critics Awards.
Though his time-travel romance Il Mare was not a popular success in 2000, since then it has developed a loyal fan base a la Somewhere in Time and attained the status of a minor classic among Korean cinema fans (Keanu Reeves played Lee's role in the 2006 Hollywood remake The Lake House). Lee followed up with melodrama Last Present alongside Lee Young-ae and action mystery The Last Witness directed by Bae Chang-ho. In 2002, Lee starred alongside Jang Jin-young in Over the Rainbow. In 2003, he starred opposite Lee Beom-soo in Oh! Brothers, a comedy about two brothers, one of whom has an unusual disease. The film was one of Lee's biggest hits ever, topping three million admissions at the local box office. Nonetheless, he remained out of the limelight for the next couple years. Finally at the end of 2005 he returned in Typhoon, a big-budget action blockbuster by Kwak Kyung-taek, the director of Friend.
Lee's much-anticipated return to television a decade after his memorable turn in Sandglass (1995) was not successful ratings-wise; Air City (2007) and Triple (2009). With the period action comedy The Accidental Gangster and the Mistaken Courtesan, Lee said he wanted to try his hand at playing a different kind of role, a comical loose cannon type of character. Though it was not successful at the box office, he still considers it one of his most memorable films.
Lee rejuvenated his career in the high-profile 2010 erotic thriller The Housemaid, which screened at the Cannes Film Festival, and Toronto International Film Festival. Lee nabbed a Best Actor award at the Fantasporto Director's Week. As his next project, he joined the star-studded ensemble cast of The Thieves, a 2012 heist film that became the second all-time highest-grossing movie in Korean cinema history. El Fin del Mundo ("The End of the World") is a 13-minute split screen film made by visual artists Moon Kyung-won and Jeon Joon-ho, which depicts the destructive environmental changes the world faces in the future and the subsequent end of art and birth of new art based on dialogue between two artists in different times and space, played by Lee and Im Soo-jung. The film was screened at dOCUMENTA in 2012, considered the world's most prestigious and innovative contemporary art platform. A longtime art collector and honorary ambassador for the National Museum of Contemporary Art in 2011–2012, Lee also narrated the 2013 TV documentary Contemporary Art, Bury the Boundary which highlighted homegrown Korean artists.
