Park Chan Yeol | 박찬열 | About

Park Chan Yeol took up the drums after seeing "School of Rock" as a boy, decided on singing after hearing Yoo Young Jin, and had a band called Heavy Noise through his first years of secondary school. His parents run an Italian restaurant in Seoul; his older sister Park Yoo Ra was a broadcaster at YTN and MBC. He was placed in the 2008 Smart Model Contest, joined SM Entertainment through its casting system that year, spent four years as a trainee turning his attention to rapping, and was the last of the twelve introduced when EXO was assembled — the twentieth teaser, on February 23, 2012. His element in the group's mythology is fire.

He acts and he writes. His first film was "Salut d'Amour" (2015), followed the same year by the lead in the web drama "EXO Next Door" beside Moon Ga Young, which brought him Best New Actor and the Hallyu Star Award at the 8th Korea Drama Awards. Then "So I Married an Anti-fan" (2016) and MBC's "Missing 9" (2017). As a writer he registered with the copyright association under the name LOEY — Yeol backwards — and has written raps and lyrics for EXO's own records: "Run", "Promise", "Lightsaber" for the "Star Wars" tie-in, and "Heaven".

In December 2016 he recorded "Stay With Me" with Punch for "Goblin". It went to number three on the Gaon digital chart, took Asia OST Popularity at the Asia Model Festival Awards and Best Korean Single of the Year at the KKBox Music Awards, and became the first Korean drama soundtrack to pass a hundred million views on YouTube — inside a year of release. He set up his own production studio, NNG, in October 2020, served from March 2021 to September 2022, and debuted on his own with the EP "Black Out" in August 2024, following it with "Upside Down" a year later and a Japanese EP, "hibi", that October.

He plays piano, drums, guitar and bass, has a tattoo of a monkey for the year he was born and one reading L-1485 for the date EXO's fan club was founded, and had laser eye surgery before he debuted, which is why bright light bothers him. On his twenty-third birthday a Chinese fan community raised thirty million won in under three hours and bought him a forest in Seoul's World Cup Park.