Park Haeil, born in 1977, started his acting career early on with a first experience on stage in his childhood. Having won Best New Actor in the theatre category of the Baeksang Arts Awards in 2000 for his role as the lead in the Korean play <Ode to Youth>, filmmakers took notice of him and were drawn by his somewhat boyish appearance, which could be seen at odd with the great maturity in his acting. Following a supporting role in the inspirational indie favorite <Wa...More

Park Haeil, born in 1977, started his acting career early on with a first experience on stage in his childhood. Having won Best New Actor in the theatre category of the Baeksang Arts Awards in 2000 for his role as the lead in the Korean play <Ode to Youth>, filmmakers took notice of him and were drawn by his somewhat boyish appearance, which could be seen at odd with the great maturity in his acting. Following a supporting role in the inspirational indie favorite <Waikiki Brothers> (2001) from YIM Soon-rye, he took on the lead role in another well-known indie drama, <Jealousy Is My Middle Name> (2002). A new chapter in his filmography was opened when he was cast against type in the role of an unsettling innocent-looking suspect of a series of gruesome murders in Bong Joonho’s universally acclaimed <Memories of Murder> (2003). Speaking on these conflicting impressions the actor would give, Bong compared him to “a soap-smelling pervert”. Park then played an unscrupulous womanizer teacher who keeps hitting on his new colleague in <Rules of Dating> (2005), a far cry from the ideal image of a romantic and bright man he had in <My Mother, The Mermaid> (2004), which had won him many fans. From then on, he would steer away from romantic fare to expand his acting repertoire. He reunited with director Bong for <The Host> (2006). Following the thriller film <Paradise Murdered> (2007), Park worked again with director Kim Hanmin for <War of the Arrows>, which became the biggest box-office draw of 2011 with over 7 million admissions. Park’s performance was particularly praised and earned him awards from the Blue Dragon Film Awards and the Grand Bell Awards, preceded by another accolade at the Bucheon Fantastic Film Festival. He stretched his acting scope further still as he took on the role of an elderly poet in the acclaimed 2012 feature <Eungyo>, for which he was grimed to look 40 years older. The Song Haesung family drama <Boomerang Family> followed in 2013 before he returned to romantic fare, his first since 2005, in the Zhang Lu film <Gyeongju> (2014). Two more high profile roles followed later that year with Lee Haejun’s second solo direction effort <My Dictator>, in which he played Sul Kyunggu’s son, and Yim Soonrye’s <The Whistleblower>, where he played a journalist who becomes the target of a mobbing campaign and political pressure after he reveals that a high-profile stem cell research project is nothing but a fraud. Slowing for a moment, Park only appeared in Zhang Lu’s anthology <Love and…> before returning in 2016 to the commercial fold, with an appearance in Hur Jinho’s Colonial Era romantic drama <The Last Princess> (2016). With the historical war drama <The Fortress>, Park went back to the exact same period that was depicted in <War in Arrows>, but this time to portray the notorious ruler of that time, King Injo of Joseon, as he was forced to surrender to the Qing army after a long siege in the mountains. After another critically acclaimed collaboration with Zhang in <Ode to the Goose> (2018), Park played the monk who largely contributed to the creation of the Korean alphabet in the historical drama <The King’s Letters> (2019). In 2022, he starred in two of the most important releases of the year. He was first seen as the male lead role in Park Chanwook’s <Decision to Leave>, which earned the filmmaker the Cannes award for Best Director, and soon after that film’s Korean release, Park was back at it again as he played the young historical hero Admiral Yi Sun-shin in <Hansan: Rising Dragon> (2022), his third collaboration with Kim Hanmin.Less