In September 2022, a Korean man in his fifties walked onstage in Los Angeles and became the first Asian actor to win the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series. The role was Seong Gi-hun, a broke, gambling-addicted father chasing a debt collector through a children’s game. For most of the West, that was the introduction. For Korea, it was the late chapter of a career that had already run two full decades.
Who he is
Lee Jung-jae (이정재, born 1972) started out as a fashion model before stepping in front of a camera, and he spent the better part of the 1990s and 2000s as one of Korean cinema’s coolest leading men. He carried the swooning long-distance romance of Il Mare (2000), pulled off the slick ensemble heist of The Thieves (2012), and gave his sharpest pre-Squid Game performance in the gangster epic New World (2013), where his face stays unreadable for two hours while he decides which men he’s going to betray. He is the rare actor who reads equally as a heartthrob and as a man you absolutely should not trust.
What makes Gi-hun such a left turn is how openly he wears everything. He cries easily, panics loudly, makes terrible decisions out of decency. After winning his Emmy, Lee stepped behind the camera to direct the Cannes-premiered spy thriller Hunt (2022), and went on to play the Jedi Master Sol in Disney’s Star Wars: The Acolyte (2024) — a reminder that the range was always there, even before Netflix made it global. None of those titles live on koroute, though; what we cover here is his Squid Game work, and that is plenty to start with.
Where to start on koroute
Start with Squid Game Season 2 (오징어 게임). It’s the cleaner entry point of the two seasons we cover, and it’s where Lee’s performance turns. The naive, hapless Gi-hun of the first season is gone. He returns with the prize money untouched, a list of grudges, and one goal: get back inside and burn the whole thing down. Lee plays him colder, angrier, more calculating — closer, frankly, to the morally compromised men he built his film career on. Watch it first, then move straight into Season 3, because the two were shot together and the story runs as one continuous arc.
Squid Game Season 2 (2024) puts Gi-hun back in the green tracksuit as Player 456, but this time he knows the rules and the body count. The season’s spine is his attempt to convince a roomful of desperate strangers to vote the games to a stop — a slow, grinding campaign of persuasion that keeps failing against human greed. Lee carries long stretches of it on his face alone, the hope draining out of him round by round. It’s a study in someone trying to be the conscience of a system designed to have none.
Squid Game Season 3 (2025) is the closer, and it asks the hardest version of the question the show has been circling all along: what does Gi-hun owe people who keep choosing the worst thing? Lee spends much of it stripped of speeches and bravado, reacting rather than rallying, and the restraint is the point. If Season 2 is about a man certain he can change the game, Season 3 is about what’s left of him when that certainty cracks. Save it for last; it only lands if you’ve sat through everything Gi-hun lost to get there.
Two seasons, one role, and an actor doing some of his most exposed work after thirty years of playing it cool. If you only know Lee Jung-jae from the Emmy clip, the games are where you’ll understand why it mattered. Begin with Squid Game Season 2 and don’t stop until the lights go out on Season 3.
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