🇰🇷 Lee Min-ho

He was born in Heukseok-dong, a hillside Seoul neighborhood, on June 22, 1987, and he wanted to be a footballer. A fifth-grade knee injury ended that ambition and pushed him, almost by accident, toward acting. He auditioned, got bit parts on EBS school dramas, and in 2006 was nearly killed in a car crash that confined him to a hospital bed for months. He has since described that year, with characteristic understatement, as the one that decided everything.

Boys Over Flowers arrived in 2009 and detonated. Adapted from Yoko Kamio's manga Hana Yori Dango, the show was hardly subtle — a poor girl, four impossibly rich boys, a swimming pool, a wedding dress — but Lee, as the bullying-then-besotted Gu Jun-pyo, played the cartoon with a tender wobble that made the whole thing land. The series ran for 25 episodes and turned him into a continental obsession. Filipino malls played its theme song in elevators. Thai networks dubbed it three different ways. He won Best New Actor at the Baeksang Awards and never auditioned again.

He followed with Personal Taste (2010) and then City Hunter (2011), an SBS revenge thriller that gave him a harder edge — and the action-hero credibility to escape the perm. The Korean press, ever fond of nicknames, called him the man who could carry a network on his shoulders. By the time he played the cursed prince of Faith (2012) and the chaebol heir of The Heirs (2013), opposite Park Shin-hye, his global fan base had outgrown Asia entirely; the Heirs press tour drew screaming crowds in Beijing and Bangkok that required riot police.

Then came The Legend of the Blue Sea (2016), a mermaid-and-conman fantasy with Jun Ji-hyun that aired in 30 countries simultaneously, and a 21-month mandatory military enlistment that began in May 2017. He served as a public service worker — a back injury sustained during City Hunter disqualified him from active duty — and emerged in 2019 leaner, quieter, and visibly older, into a Korean entertainment landscape transformed by the arrival of Netflix.

His comeback vehicle, The King: Eternal Monarch (2020), was the kind of swing only a star of his magnitude could attempt: a 16-episode SBS-Netflix co-production about parallel Koreas, written by the legendary screenwriter Kim Eun-sook. The reviews were mixed, but the show drew the largest international streaming audience of any Korean drama to that point, and confirmed something the industry had long suspected — that Lee was no longer merely an Asian star but a Netflix-scale global one.

Pachinko, the lavish Apple TV+ adaptation of Min Jin Lee's novel, recast him in 2022 as the cold, calculating fish broker Koh Hansu — a role that gave him, for the first time, English-language scenes and a serious-drama platform. Critics who had once dismissed him as a pretty face reassessed. A second season followed in 2024. In between he made Ask the Stars, a romantic comedy set on a space station, because the man who became famous as a candy-floss prince has earned, more than most, the right to be silly.

He keeps his private life private — a long-discussed romance with the singer Suzy ended quietly in 2017 — and he runs a content company, MYM Entertainment, that he co-founded in his twenties. He has more than 30 million Instagram followers, brand deals with Fendi and Bulgari, and a charity, Promiz, that he launched on his 27th birthday and has funded ever since. The boy who wanted to play football, it turns out, found a different kind of stadium.