Lee Jong-suk

Lee Jong-suk started on a catwalk. He debuted as a runway model in 2005, which in the Korean industry is a common enough route into acting and usually produces a career built on a face. His went another way. School 2013 and then a 2013 legal drama with a supernatural hook established him as an actor with more going on, and the run that followed put him at the centre of some of the most structurally ambitious dramas Korean television has attempted.

What he is unusually good at is playing men who are inside a premise and know it. In W: Two Worlds Apart he is Kang Cheol, a character in a webtoon who works out what he is. In Pinocchio he is a man living under a second name and a second life. While You Were Sleeping hangs entirely on foreknowledge; Big Mouth on a mistaken identity that keeps escalating. These are high-concept shows that collapse the moment the lead treats them as a joke, and his particular skill is taking an absurd rule as seriously as he would take a bereavement.

The film career has been more scattered. Soar Into the Sun and The Face Reader came early, V.I.P. is a hard and genuinely unpleasant crime picture, The Witch: Part 2 a franchise appearance, Decibel a thriller. The softer register suits him too: Romance Is a Bonus Book, and a cameo in Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok-joo credited under his own name, sit at the opposite pole from Big Mouth. Recent work includes The Plot and the 2025 series Law and the City.