Lee Jung-jae이정재

Lee Jung-jae (이정재) is a South Korean actor, director and producer, born on December 15, 1972, in Seoul.¹ He worked as a fashion model before his acting debut in the 1993 TV drama Dinosaur Teacher. In 1995 he played the heroine's silent bodyguard, a role first planned as a small one, in SBS's Sandglass (모래시계).¹ That drama is #4 in DabPop's ranking of the highest-rated K-dramas on Korean TV, with a peak rating of 64.5%.² On film he won Best Actor at the Blue Dragon Film Awards for City of the Rising Sun (태양은 없다, 1999), and Best Supporting Actor at both the Blue Dragon and Baeksang Arts Awards for The Face Reader (관상, 2013). Wikipedia's list of his awards counts six Baeksang wins in all.¹³

In 2021 he took the lead role of Seong Gi-hun, player 456, in Netflix's Squid Game (오징어 게임), which ran for three seasons until 2025 (see the seasons by the numbers).⁴ For Season 1 he won the 2022 Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series. He and the show's creator, Hwang Dong-hyuk (황동혁), who won for directing, became the first Asians to win those two categories, as DabPop's account of Korean directors at Cannes, the Oscars and the Emmys records.⁵ Lee also won the Screen Actors Guild Award for a male actor in a drama series, part of the first SAG Awards won by a non-English-language series, and was nominated for a Golden Globe.⁴ Gallup Korea named him its Film Actor of the Year in December 2021, and in December 2022 he received the Geumgwan Order of Cultural Merit, the highest decoration South Korea awards for contributions to culture and the arts.¹

Lee made his feature debut as a director with the spy thriller Hunt (헌트), which he also co-wrote, produced and starred in alongside Jung Woo-sung (정우성). It premiered in the Midnight Screenings section of the Cannes Film Festival on May 19, 2022, and opened at No. 1 at the South Korean box office that August.⁶ It won him Best New Director at the 2022 Blue Dragon Film Awards.³ In 2016 Lee and Jung founded the entertainment label Artist Company, and Lee later led the cast of the Disney+ Star Wars series The Acolyte, his first English-language role.¹