Lee Yumi is an actress known for being the first Korean actor to be awarded an Emmy. Born in 1994, Lee began her career when she was still in middle school, appearing in a commercial in 2009. She went on with a series of bit parts on television and the big screen, most notable among them Na Hongjin’s <The Yellow Sea> (2010). During that period, she also starred in the kid TV show <Future Boy> (2010). Her career really took off once she reached maturity, as she ...More

Lee Yumi is an actress known for being the first Korean actor to be awarded an Emmy. Born in 1994, Lee began her career when she was still in middle school, appearing in a commercial in 2009. She went on with a series of bit parts on television and the big screen, most notable among them Na Hongjin’s <The Yellow Sea> (2010). During that period, she also starred in the kid TV show <Future Boy> (2010). Her career really took off once she reached maturity, as she was offered meatier roles by indie filmmaker Shin Yeonshick, with whom she worked on <The Russian Novel> (2012), <The Avian Kind> (2014) and <Like a French Film> (2014). She also found success on the smaller screen with credits in series such as <20th Century Boy and Girl> (2017), <Dance Sports Girls> (2018) and <Doctor John> (2019). Her performance as Sejin, a teenage runaway who lives with the title character with whom she regularly has tension in the indie film <Park Hwa-young> (2018) put her on film critics’ radar, with many lauding how much of an impact she made despite a relatively short screen time. She followed this up with another remarked role in the time travel thriller series <365: Repeat the year> (2020), and later <Park Hwa-young> director Lee Hwan became the first to give her top billing in his sophomore project <Young Adult Matters> (2020), reprising her role as a now pregnant Sejin who befriends another runaway as she tries to get an abortion. This allowed her to win her first awards, the Korean Film Producers Association and the Buil Film Awards naming her Best New Actress. Her breakthrough year would be 2021, when she participated in the phenomenon that Netflix original series <Squid Game> (2021) became. Although she played a supporting role, she made a strong impression with her turn as a North Korean refugee who did some jail time for killing her abusive father and resolves to take part in the lethal games after struggling to make a living due to her past. This performance would eventually lead her to make history as she became the first Korean actor to win an Emmy Award when she received the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series in 2022 (<Squid Game> star Lee Jungjae having won his trophy a week later during the main ceremony). Also in 2022, she was back on Netflix again in the zombie drama series <All of Us Are Dead>, and as a result accomplished the rare feat of being nominated for the Baeksang Arts Award for best new actress in both the television category and its film counterpart, respectively for <All of Us Are Dead> (2022) and <Young Adult Matters> (2020), ultimately winning in the latter.Less