Born in 1973, Jung Woosung spent all his childhood in poverty and as a teenage did all kinds of part-time jobs. While doing one such job at a coffee shop, he met someone from the show business who offered him a modelling gig. Before long, he had quit high school in order to dedicate himself to his modelling activities on top of his other jobs. He made his acting debut in the horror film <The Fox With Nine Tails> (1994) but both the film and his acting failed to impress ...More

Born in 1973, Jung Woosung spent all his childhood in poverty and as a teenage did all kinds of part-time jobs. While doing one such job at a coffee shop, he met someone from the show business who offered him a modelling gig. Before long, he had quit high school in order to dedicate himself to his modelling activities on top of his other jobs. He made his acting debut in the horror film <The Fox With Nine Tails> (1994) but both the film and his acting failed to impress audiences. He caught the attention of many when he moved to television the following year with the miniseries <Asphalt Man>, in which he was playing against no other than a younger Lee Byunghun. But it was <Beat> (1997), directed by Kim Sungsoo, that made him a rising young star, and he cemented that new status soon after with his role as a lonely boxer in <City of the Rising Sun> (1998). He received good reviews for his charismatic act in <Phantom, The Submarine> (1999), Korea’s first movie set in a submarine, and he gained international fame for his role as a warrior in <Musa-The Warrior>. With <Mutt Boy>, directed by Kwak Kyungtaek, Jung expanded his acting range to break away from his tough image and show a more vulnerable side. From then one, he was regularly cast in melodrama movies, such as <A Moment to Remember>, <Sad Movie>, <Daisy>, <The Restless> and <A Good Rain Knows>. He returned to a manly character with the western film <The Good, The Bad, and The Weird> and took a familiar role as a debonair but strong man in <Reign of Assassins> directed by John Wo. Following a turn in the popular action TV drama <Athena: Goddess of War>, Jung returned to Korean films to play his first ever villain in the popular 2013 thriller <Cold Eyes>. Jung next appeared in the 2014 noir <The Divine Move>. Following that, he was the lead in Yim Pilsung’s long-awaited third feature, which turned out to be the erotic mystery-thriller <Scarlet Innocence>, an update of an old Korean fairy tale that saw him play a professor whose tryst with a student comes back to haunt him as he goes blind. 2015 began with melodrama <Remember You> alongside Kim Haneul, which also marked a first for him as an executive producer. He followed this up with a pair of large-scale thrillers, first Kim Sungsu’s <Asura> and later Han Jaerim’s <The King>. He played a North Korean secret agent trying to prevent a coup in his country with the help of a South Korean counterpart in the geopolitical action thriller <Steel Rain>, before giving an award-winning performance in <Innocent Witness> as an attorney who tries to reach out to the unique witness to a murder, a girl who is on the spectrum, in order to secure an acquittal for his client. He returned for the follow-up to <Steel Rain>, <Steel Rain2: Summit>, this time playing the South Korean President as he is taken hostage along with North Korea’s Supreme Leader and the US President in a nuclear submarine. In 2022, he starred in the directorial debut of his friend and fellow actor Lee Jungjae, <HUNT>. Less