Lee Min-ki

Lee Min-ki (born January 16, 1985) is a South Korean actor and former model from Gimhae, South Gyeongsang Province. He began as a model and established himself on television during the mid-2000s. Early credits included Taereung National Village (2005), a series centered on athletes at a national training facility, and Love Truly (2006-2007). His screen persona often used a tall, reserved presence, but his choices have ranged from romantic leads to volatile or emotionally guarded characters. That range later became particularly visible in projects that paired familiar genre premises with sharper observations about work, class, relationships, and psychological pressure in.

In Dal-ja's Spring (2007), Lee played Kang Tae-bong, a younger man whose relationship with Chae Rim's advertising executive Oh Dal-ja drives the romantic-comedy plot. In 2017, he returned to major television attention as Nam Se-hee in Because This Is My First Life, opposite Jung So-min as Yoon Ji-ho. The series follows a financially constrained computer designer and an aspiring writer who enter a contract marriage while sharing a home. Lee's character is defined by his carefully organized routines, debt concerns, and gradual difficulty separating practical arrangements from affection. The role helped make the drama one of his most discussed television performances.

His film work includes Spellbound (2011), a romantic comedy in which he starred opposite Son Ye-jin as street magician Jo-goo, who discovers that a woman he meets is followed by a ghost. In Very Ordinary Couple (2013), he and Kim Min-hee portrayed former lovers whose breakup turns into a painfully comic workplace conflict at a securities firm. He then took darker parts in Monster (2014), opposite Kim Go-eun, and For the Emperor (2014), a crime drama involving Busan's gambling underworld. In Shoot Me in the Heart (2015), adapted from Jeong Yu-jeong's novel, he played hospital inmate Ryu Myung-hoon alongside Yeo Jin-goo.

Lee resumed TV with The Beauty Inside (2018), playing Seo Do-jae, an airline executive with prosopagnosia, opposite Seo Hyun-jin's character, whose appearance changes periodically. He played Chang Hee, a bank employee who returns to his rural hometown, in My Liberation Notes (2022), written by Park Hae-young. The ensemble drama follows three siblings seeking release from exhausted daily lives. That year, he appeared in the sound-terror film Decibel as a former navy officer targeted by a bomber. In 2024, he led Crash, portraying traffic-crime investigator Cha Yeon-ho, a newcomer to a police team handling road-related offenses and insurance fraud cases.