Ji Jin Hee | 지진희 | About

Ji Jin Hee read visual design at Myongji University and was working as a photographer at an advertising agency when Park Seong Hye suggested he try acting. He was happy where he was and did not think he could act, and turned it down for a year — until the agency shed staff in the IMF crisis and made the decision for him. He appeared in a music video in 1999 and made his acting debut in the drama "Female Secretary" the following year.

"Dae Jang Geum", better known abroad as "Jewel in the Palace", changed everything in 2003. As the Joseon official who falls for the cook turned royal physician played by Lee Young Ae, he was decent and straight-backed and enormously popular for it; the drama peaked at 57.8% at home and became one of the vehicles that carried the Korean wave across Asia. He worked to get out from under it — a playboy layabout in "Miss Kim's Million Dollar Quest" (2004), which brought him his first acting award, a cartoonist in the black comedy "Bewitching Attraction" (2006), a released political prisoner in Im Sang Soo's "The Old Garden" (2007), and twin brothers, one of them a contract killer, in "Soo".

He came back to television as a fastidious forty-year-old bachelor in "He Who Can't Marry" (2009), which won him an Excellence Award at the KBS Drama Awards, and reunited with the "Dae Jang Geum" director Lee Byung Hoon for "Dong Yi" (2010), playing King Sukjong opposite Han Hyo Joo. He wanted a monarch with the weak spots showing through, he said, rather than a dignified one; it took a Top Excellence Award at the MBC Drama Awards and prizes in Hong Kong and China. Then "Take Care of Us, Captain" (2012), "One Warm Word" (2013), the villainous hospital director of "Blood" (2015), "I Have a Lover" (2015), "Misty" (2018) and "Designated Survivor: 60 Days" (2019).

He wrote the original draft of the horror comedy "Ghost Sweepers" (2012) and holds a story credit on it, and published a book of photographs and essays about Rome, Florence and Milan, with wine notes. In 2008 he took his and his wife's wedding rings to a charity auction in Beijing for the victims of the Sichuan earthquake.