Gong Yoo

Gong Yoo has been linked with several of his co-stars over the years. After portraying an on-screen couple on ‘The First Shop of Coffee Prince’, there were rumours that he and actress Yoon Eun-hye were dating. However, they both denied having any romantic relationship.

In 2008, a weekly magazine in Korea reported that Gong Yoo had taken actress Im Soo-jung to Jeju Island in southern coast of Korea for a vacation. Some of their friends had apparently accompanied them as well.

In summer 2016, everyone from his fans to the media started speculating that Gong Yoo and Im had gotten married. His manager later released a statement on October 24, 2016, calling the rumours “ungrounded and false”.

Gong Yoo was born on July 10, 1979, in Busan, South Korea. His father is Gong Won. Fellow actor Kang Dong-won is his cousin. Interested in acting since childhood, he graduated with a degree in theatre from the Kyung Hee University.

After his debut in the KBS2 drama ‘School 4’ as Hwang Tae-young, Gong Yoo spent the next two years appearing in small roles in TV shows such as ‘Whenever the Heart Beats (2002), ‘Hard Love’ (2002), ‘20 Years’ (2003), ‘Best Theater: Flying Saucer’ (2003), ‘Screen’ (2003), and ‘My Room, Your Room’ (2003). He hosted the 2004 MBC show ‘Music Camp’.

Gong Yoo made his debut on the big screen with ‘My Tutor Friend’, a 2003 romantic comedy where he portrayed Lee Jong-soo, a high-school student.

In 2004, he did three films, ‘Spy Girl’, ‘Superstar Mr Gam’, and ‘S Diary’. In ‘Spy Girl’, he played Choi Go-bong, a student who falls in love with a local Burger King employee. But the girl turns out to be a North Korean Spy. He was cast as Park Chul-soo, an ace-baseball pitcher, in the sports drama ‘Superstar Mr Gam’. He portrayed a wandering artist in ‘S Diary’.

He starred alongside Gong Hyo-jin in ‘Hello My Teacher’, a role that effectively set him out on the road to international stardom. The 16-episode series got him an Excellence Award nomination at the 2005 SBS Drama Awards.

‘Like a Dragon’, the live-action adaptation of ‘Yakuja’, a PlayStation 2 video game released in 2005, was a Japanese crime film directed by Takashi Miike. As Park, a mysterious Korean hitman, Gong Yoo shone in the film. Its popularity led to the making of five more episodes, multiple spin-offs, and a direct-to-video film, ‘Like a Dragon: Prologue.’

Gong Yoo portrayed Seok-woo, a workaholic fund manager, in the 2016 zombie apocalyptic action thriller ‘Train to Busan’. Directed by Yeon Sang-ho, it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and went on set a record of being the first Korean movie of the year to register over 10 million theatregoers. The film marks the reunion of Gong Yoo and Jung Yu-mi, their first movie together since ‘The Crucible’.

He starred as the eponymous character in the tvN fantasy romance drama ‘Guardian: The Lonely and Great God’ (2016-17). Known internationally as simply ‘Goblin’, the show was a major hit and regularly topped cable television viewership ratings in South Korea, with the series finale documenting an 18.680% audience share, the second highest rated episode in the history of Korean television after ‘Reply 1988’ (2015-16). It has since come to be regarded as a cultural phenomenon in South Korea.