Lee Jong-suk – Biography, Age, Korean Dramas & Movies

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Melodrama · Romance Lead

이종석

Lee Jong‑suk

KDW Fan Rating

Editorial scoring by KDW — not an objective metric.

Acting Skill85

Charisma88

Versatility87

Popularity90

Career Balance

Supporting (8)(15) Lead

Age36 years 11 months 18 days

NationalitySouth Korea

AgencyAce Factory (signed January 2024); previously…

Debut2010

🏆Award
Winning

19Dramas

11Films

KDRAMAWORLDS.COM

👨 Who Is Lee Jong-suk?

Big Mouth (2022) asked Lee Jong-suk to spend twelve episodes as two different men — Park Chang-ho, a failing lawyer mistaken for a legendary conman, and the untouchable “Big Mouse” he’s forced to become to survive prison. It was his first drama back after two years of mandatory service, and it did something few comeback vehicles manage: it didn’t just remind audiences he could still carry a hit, it expanded who was watching. The role won him the Daesang, the top prize, at the 2022 MBC Drama Awards — the second Daesang of his career, following W: Two Worlds in 2016.

That range is the throughline of a career now past its fifteenth year. Lee debuted as a supporting player in Secret Garden and a young prosecutor in his first lead role, then spent the 2010s cycling through a courtroom thriller with a telepathy twist (I Hear Your Voice), a medical drama about a doctor smuggled out of North Korea (Doctor Stranger), a dual role as a former boxer masquerading as a news anchor (Pinocchio), and a webtoon hero who steps out of the page (W: Two Worlds) — genre-hopping that rarely reads as indecision, since each performance tends to win over the audience it’s aimed at. With Law and the City behind him and the Disney+ series The Remarried Empress ahead, that pattern shows no sign of slowing down.

📋 Quick Profile

🚀 Career Timeline

Biography

🏡 Early Life

Lee Jong-suk is the eldest of three siblings, with a younger brother and a younger sister, raised under a father he’s described as notably strict with him specifically — a dynamic he’s linked to being the oldest child in a quiet, reserved family. He was a shy teenager by his own account, the kind of kid who got visibly nervous once more than a handful of people were looking at him, which makes his early pivot into modeling something of an anomaly.

That pivot came at fifteen, when he walked the Seoul Collection runway at Seoul Fashion Week in 2005 and became the youngest male model to do so. He briefly trained as an idol-group hopeful around the same period — he was a former SM Entertainment trainee — before an agency deal promising an acting debut fell through when the label tried to push him toward music instead. He left rather than compromise, a decision that would end up defining the rest of his career.

🎤 Career Beginnings

Walking away from that broken promise didn’t lead anywhere fast. Lee took a small supporting role in 2010’s Secret Garden and the title character’s love interest in Prosecutor Princess the same year — his official TV debut — and spent the next two years working steadily without a real breakout. A sitcom ensemble turn in High Kick: Revenge of the Short-Legged kept him visible but didn’t move the needle much further.

School 2013 changed that. Cast opposite Kim Woo-bin as one of two students drifting through a vocational high school, Lee played Go Nam-soon with an unpolished rawness that stood out against glossier teen dramas of the era, and it won him his first acting trophy: Best New Actor at the 2012 KBS Drama Awards. The real momentum didn’t land until the following year, when I Hear Your Voice made him one of the most in-demand young leads in the industry almost overnight.

🎬 Acting Style

What’s kept Lee Jong-suk working across fifteen-plus years isn’t one signature mode — it’s a willingness to be reintroduced to audiences every couple of years as someone slightly different. I Hear Your Voice cast him as Park Soo-ha, a courtroom-thriller lead who can read minds, and the performance leaned into vulnerability as much as procedural tension: a teenager carrying a secret that made him dangerous to know, played without the swagger the premise could easily have invited. It’s the role most often cited as his true arrival, and it set a template — high-concept premise, grounded by an unusually unguarded lead performance — that Pinocchio, W: Two Worlds, and While You Were Sleeping would each repeat with different hooks.

That same grounding is what makes his rarer detours land. V.I.P. cast him against type as a cold, entitled murder suspect, a performance built on stillness rather than theatrics that critics singled out as proof he wasn’t just a melodrama fixture. Big Mouth pushed further still, splitting a single role into two distinct registers — meek and terrified, then commanding and unreadable — inside the same twelve episodes. The common thread across all of it: he tends to underplay the exact moment a script hands him permission to go big.

🌟 Legacy

By his mid-thirties, Lee Jong-suk has built a resume that resists a single label — melodrama lead, fantasy-thriller anchor, occasional villain, daily-drama veteran — while staying reliably near the top of the ratings whenever he returns to television. W: Two Worlds and Big Mouth each delivered him the MBC Drama Awards Daesang, the ceremony’s top honor, six years apart, a repeat that few actors of his generation can claim.

His reach has extended well past Korea. Pinocchio and W: Two Worlds built him a following across China and Southeast Asia substantial enough that a wax figure of him went on permanent display at Madame Tussauds Hong Kong, and in 2017 he was named a Goodwill Ambassador for Korean tourism by the Korea Tourism Organization — an official nod to exactly the kind of cross-border pull his dramas generate. Big Mouth’s post-military reception suggested that pull hasn’t faded with age; the Disney+ scale of The Remarried Empress suggests his next chapter is aimed even further outward.

🎥 Notable Works & Iconic Roles

W: Two Worlds (2016)

While You Were Sleeping (2017)

Romance Is a Bonus Book (2019)

Doctor Stranger (2014)

V.I.P. (2017)

Decibel (2022)

Big Mouth (2022)

Pinocchio (2014)

W: Two Worlds (2016)

While You Were Sleeping (2017)

Romance Is a Bonus Book (2019)

Doctor Stranger (2014)

V.I.P. (2017)

Decibel (2022)

Big Mouth (2022)

Pinocchio (2014)

🎞️ Filmography

📸 Gallery Preview

🥇 Awards & Honors

🆕 Recent & Upcoming Projects

Lee closed out his most recent run with Law and the City (2025), a tvN legal drama that put him back in a courtroom as public defender An Ju-hyeong, following a stretch that included the disaster-action film Decibel (2022) and a supporting turn in The Witch: Part 2 (2022) — a pattern of alternating television leads with film work rather than settling into one lane.

What’s ahead is bigger in scale. The Remarried Empress, a Disney+ original adapting the popular webtoon of the same name, casts him as Heinrey Alles Lazlo opposite Shin Min-a — a fantasy-romance period piece built for a global streaming audience rather than a domestic broadcast slot, and by a wide margin the largest platform he’s worked on to date.

🤝 Brand Ambassador

🌸 Personal Life

He completed his mandatory military service as a public service worker rather than an active-duty soldier, after a car accident at sixteen left him with a torn anterior cruciate ligament. He enlisted on March 8, 2019 and was discharged on January 2, 2021.

He dated singer-actress IU for four years after their agencies confirmed the relationship on December 31, 2022; the two first met in 2012 as co-hosts of SBS’s Inkigayo. Their agencies jointly confirmed on July 10, 2026 that the couple had broken up, saying they plan to remain on good terms as colleagues.

He signed with Ace Factory in January 2024, after his contract with HighZium Studio wasn’t renewed the previous September — following earlier stints at YG Entertainment and the independent label he co-founded, A-man Project.

🤔 Fun Facts

• He was the youngest male model ever to walk the Seoul Collection runway at Seoul Fashion Week, debuting there at fifteen in 2005.
• He became the youngest actor to win Best Actor at the Grimae Awards, taking the prize at the 27th ceremony in 2014 for Pinocchio.
• A wax figure of him went on permanent display at Madame Tussauds Hong Kong, which he unveiled in person.
• He briefly trained as an idol-group hopeful and was a former SM Entertainment trainee before leaving to pursue acting instead.
• He can play the piano and has training in Taekwondo, drawing, and baduk (Korean chess).
• He’s described himself as getting visibly nervous once more than about eight people are looking directly at him, a holdover from an unusually shy childhood.
• He ran a dining cafe called ’89 Mansion’ in Seoul’s Garosu-gil, named for his 1989 birth year, until it permanently closed on September 14, 2020 — his birthday — due to the pandemic.

💬 Quotes

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