Han Hyo-joo (한효주)

Han Hyo-joo belongs to a select circle of Korean actors who can draw in both TV and movie audiences while enjoying critical praise. Since her first lead role in the 2006 melodrama Spring Waltz, she has starred in popular works and racked up an impressive number of trophies from prestigious award-giving bodies, certifying her Hallyu star and Chungmuro elite status. Trilingual and multi-talented, she worked on Japanese films and an American action series and released a few tracks for her k-drama’s OSTs.

Photo from HanCinema

Birthday: February 22, 1987

Instagram: @hanhyojoo222

After winning the Grand Prize in a 2003 food company-sponsored teen pageant, she debuted as an actress in the 2005 sitcom Nonstop 5 and in 2006’s My Boss, My Teacher, one of the all-time highest-grossing South Korean comedy films. Her first acting award came soon after, when she played a stand-in for a dying man’s daughter in the 2006 indie movie Ad-lib Night.

Not to be outdone by her veteran co-stars, she showed off her acting prowess and collected numerous acting trophies along the way. In her breakthrough performance alongside Lee Seung-gi in SBS’s 2009 hit TV series Brilliant Legacy, she received the Seoul International Drama Awards Outstanding Korean Actress award. In her titular role opposite Ji Jin-hee in MBC’s 2010 highly rated romance sageuk Dong Yi, she earned the Baeksang Best Actress award. Her 2012 sageuk Masquerade opposite Lee Byung-hyun is one of the all-time top-grossing Korean movies, bagging both Baeksang and Grand Bell Best Film awards. Opposite Jung Woo-sung in the 2013 blockbuster action thriller Cold Eyes, she was both Buil and Blue Dragon Best Actress.

She won the APAN Top Excellence award for her role as the savior of Lee Jong-suk's webtoon character in MBC’s 2016 fantasy metadrama W: Two Worlds. Her jailhouse kissing scene with Lee remains one of the most iconic ones in k-drama history.

With Park Hyung-sik, she flaunted her action skills in tvN’s 2021 thriller Happiness as an elite cop fighting against zombies and class discrimination. In 2022, she starred as a pirate ship owner battling against rebels and traitors in the action-adventure film The Pirates: The Last Royal Treasure.

An actor in high demand, she worked on several projects released in 2023. She played a suspicious character in the Netflix film Believer 2. Upon knowing Jo In-sung was cast as her character's partner, she reconsidered an offer to portray a badass mom with superhuman senses in the Disney+ original series Moving. With the k-drama adaptation of Kang Full’s 2015 eponymous superhero webtoon becoming a certified hit, it left viewers craving for more Jo-Joo moments. She did not disappoint her fans as she soon reunited with Jo as a guest—flooding social networks with clips of the pair's sweet interactions—in the tvN/Disney+ k-variety Unexpected Business 3.

In the star-studded Disney+ sci-fi k-drama Blood Free opposite Ju Ji-hoon, she will take on the role of the founder CEO of a company that puts an end to meat consumption.