🇰🇷 Lee Do-hyun

He was born on April 11, 1995, in Cheongju, North Chungcheong Province, to a family with no entertainment-industry connections at all. He grew up wanting to be a chef and enrolled in a culinary program before his agency, KingKong by Starship, plucked him in his late teens. He has said in interviews that he failed his first 20 auditions; the 21st, in 2017, was a tiny role in the KBS2 drama School 2017.

He spent the next two years as the quiet, slightly off-key supporting man — the friend in Hotel del Luna (2019), the second lead in 18 Again (2020) — and put in the time. 18 Again was the first that mattered: a high-concept body-swap melodrama, broadcast on JTBC, in which Lee, playing a 37-year-old returning to his 18-year-old form, had to embody middle-aged regret in a high-schooler's body without ever winking at the camera. He won Best New Actor at the Baeksang Awards and a small but committed fan base inside the industry.

Sweet Home (2020), Netflix's apocalyptic monster series adapted from a popular webtoon, gave him a global audience. He played the troubled high-schooler Lee Eun-hyuk with a controlled stillness that read, on screen, like permission for the rest of the cast to let go. The same year, he made the Korean War film Youth of May (2021), a KBS2 limited series set against the Gwangju Uprising, and his performance — at once tender and politically charged — won him Best Actor in a Miniseries at the 2021 Baeksang.

Then came The Glory (2022, with a second part in 2023), Kim Eun-sook's tightly wound, slow-fuse revenge drama on Netflix. Song Hye-kyo carried the show, but Lee's Joo Yeo-jeong — a man whose unflappable courtliness slowly revealed itself as a survival mechanism — was what the discourse fixed on. The two parts pulled in a combined viewing count that placed The Glory in Netflix's all-time top-ten non-English series, and Lee, almost overnight, became the most requested male lead in the Korean industry.

Lovely Runner (2024), a tvN time-loop romance about a woman who travels back to save her dead K-pop-idol boyfriend, was his first true leading man star vehicle, and it confirmed that he could carry one. The drama overperformed every expectation, recorded the highest-rated tvN finale of the year, and made a hit out of the fictional band Eclipse, whose songs entered the real-world Melon charts.

He enlisted for mandatory military service in August 2024, four months into a public relationship with the actress Lim Ji-yeon, his co-star from The Glory. The relationship had been confirmed in April 2023 in a manner that has become almost charmingly typical of him — a short, direct statement, no euphemisms, no spin. He has spoken openly, also, about anxiety and the years he spent in therapy before and during his breakout — the kind of disclosure that is still vanishingly rare for a leading man in Korea, and that, more than the awards, may turn out to be the most consequential thing he has done.

He is due to return from service in early 2026 with a slate of features already lined up. The industry is waiting. For once, this does not feel like hype.