Lee Hye Ri | 이혜리 | About

Lee Hye Ri, who records as Hyeri, is a South Korean actress and singer. She was raised by her grandmother in the countryside while her mother worked in a factory, was scouted at a middle-school talent show by Dream T Entertainment, and joined Girl's Day in September 2010 with almost no training — she and Yura came in as replacements two months after the group had debuted, which made her the maknae. She acted from 2012, starting as the youngest of four daughters in "Tasty Life", but it was four days on the army variety show "Real Men" in 2014 that changed things: a short clip of her doing aegyo at her drill instructor passed a million views in a day, unheard of at the time, and the press started calling her the nation's little sister. It won her Best Female Newcomer at the MBC Entertainment Awards.

"Reply 1988" followed in 2015. As Sung Deok Sun she carried the highest-rated drama Korean cable had then produced and took Best New Actress at both the Korea Drama Awards and the APAN Star Awards, a Trending Actress prize at the tvN10 Awards, and Best Kiss with Park Bo Gum. By early 2016 she had shot more than thirty commercials and been nicknamed the ten-billion-won girl; Forbes ranked her third on its Korea Power Celebrity list that year. In the drama her character carries Madagascar's placard at the 1988 Olympics opening ceremony, and the coincidence stuck: the Madagascar delegation asked her to be their real flag bearer at PyeongChang in 2018, which her schedule would not allow.

She led "Entertainer" (2016), "Two Cops" (2017), "Miss Lee" (2019), "My Roommate Is a Gumiho" (2021), "Moonshine" (2021) and "May I Help You" (2022), taking Excellence Awards at both the KBS and MBC Drama Awards, and made her film debut in "Monstrum" (2018) before "My Punch-Drunk Boxer" (2019) and "Victory" (2024), which brought her the International Rising Star Award at the New York Asian Film Festival. In 2025 she played the perfect-scoring student Yoo Jae Yi in "Friendly Rivalry", a part well away from the bright girls she had been cast as, and sang "Hyehwa-dong (or Ssangmun-dong)" with the Ssangmun-dong Kids for the tenth-anniversary "Reply 1988" soundtrack. She has given away large sums since 2016 — to elderly welfare, the Seomun Market fire, COVID relief, the Uljin wildfires, Ukraine and the Turkey-Syria earthquake — and at twenty-five became the youngest member of UNICEF's Honors Club.