Lee Byung-hun

Lee Byung-hun (Korean: 이병헌; born July 12, 1970) is a South Korean actor. He has received critical acclaim for his work in a wide range of genres, most notably Joint Security Area (2000); A Bittersweet Life (2005); The Good, the Bad, the Weird (2008); the television series Iris (2009); I Saw the Devil (2010); Masquerade (2012); and Mr. Sunshine (2018). His critically acclaimed film Inside Men (2015) won him the Best Actor prize in three prestigious award ceremonies: 52nd Baeksang Art Awards, 37th Blue Dragon Awards and 53rd Grand Bell Awards. Lee has five films—Joint Security Area, The Good, the Bad, the Weird, Masquerade, Inside Men and Master—on the list of highest-grossing films in South Korea. Lee was Gallup Korea's Actor of the Year in the Film division in 2012 and in the Television division in 2018. In 2021, he appeared in a recurring role as the Front Man in the Netflix survival drama series Squid Game. In the United States, he is known for portraying Storm Shadow in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009) and its sequel G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013), and starring alongside Bruce Willis in Red 2 (2013). He portrayed T-1000 in Terminator Genisys (2015), Billy Rocks, a knife-wielding gunslinger, in The Magnificent Seven (2016), and the Front Man in Squid Game (2021). Lee was the first South Korean actor to present an Oscar at the annual Academy Awards in Los Angeles and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Lee and Ahn Sung-ki were the first South Korean actors to imprint their hand and foot prints on the forecourt of Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles. Lee's career began in 1991 after a KBS talent audition and making his debut in the television drama Asphalt My Hometown. Lee drew attention with the action drama Asphalt Man and romantic film The Harmonium in My Memory, but it was only in 2000 that he made his big breakthrough with Park Chan-wook's Joint Security Area. The film broke the box office record and became the highest grossing Korean film at the time. Lee's role as a border-guard soldier won him the Best Actor award at the Busan Film Critics Awards.