🇰🇷 Song Joong-ki

He was born on September 19, 1985, in Daejeon, the second of three sons in a family that lived modestly until his father climbed into middle management at LG. Song was a competitive short-track speed skater as a teenager — good enough to make junior national selection — until a back injury and his parents' insistence on academics steered him toward Sungkyunkwan University, where he studied business administration. He worked, briefly and uninspiringly, as a sports announcer's apprentice. Then, in 2008, he auditioned for the period film A Frozen Flower and got a small role as a palace guard.

The roles came quickly and the right ones came almost immediately. He played the precocious young scholar in Sungkyunkwan Scandal (2010), then the impulsive crown prince's confidant in The Innocent Man (2012), where he first showed he could carry a melodrama on dimples alone. In between he hosted the variety show Running Man as a charter member, walking off in 2011 to focus on acting, a decision that read at the time as professional suicide and turned out, in retrospect, to be the cleanest pivot of his career.

A Werewolf Boy (2012), in which he played a feral child in 1960s rural Korea, became the highest-grossing Korean melodrama in history and proved that he could open a movie. Then, in August 2013, he reported for active-duty military service — 21 months at the Demilitarized Zone — and the industry braced for the usual post-enlistment fade. Instead, he returned to a script by Kim Eun-sook called Descendants of the Sun, which had been written around him.

The show was a sensation of a kind the Korean industry had not quite seen. It made him, his co-star Song Hye-kyo, and Hallyu itself feel suddenly limitless. The two leads married in October 2017 in a ceremony reported on like a state event; they divorced in July 2019 in a press statement that ran to four sentences. He has, in the years since, been notably reluctant to discuss either.

Vincenzo (2021), in which he played a Korean-Italian consigliere returning home to torch his enemies with operatic style, was the post-divorce reset — sharper, funnier, willing to wear a mustard suit. Then came Reborn Rich (2022), an SBS-JTBC fantasy about a murdered employee who reincarnates as the youngest grandson of the chaebol family that killed him. It pulled a 26.9 percent finale, became one of the highest-rated cable dramas of all time, and on its release was the most-watched non-English Netflix series in 38 countries.

He surprised the country in January 2023 by announcing, in a handwritten letter on his fan-cafe, that he had married the British actress Katy Louise Saunders and that they were expecting their first child. They have since had two; he speaks of fatherhood, in the few interviews he grants, with a self-conscious tenderness. The family lives partly in Rome.

His recent work has been increasingly international: the dystopian sci-fi feature Space Sweepers (2021), the historical drama film Hopeless (2023) at Cannes Un Certain Regard, and the gritty action movie My Name Is Loh Kiwan (2024) on Netflix, in which he plays a North Korean defector in Belgium and speaks Flemish-accented Korean to disarming effect. The boy who once raced around a frozen oval has, characteristically, just kept going.