Yeo Jin-goo

Yeo Jin-goo likes to remain secretive about his personal life and says that he hasn’t experienced love ever in his life. Going to all boys schools has made him shy around girls, and he says that he insists his friends to set blind dates for him, but he hasn’t succeeded in finding the ideal partner.

Yeo has stated openly that for some reason, he connects well with negative characters and that he would like to play an all-out negative role in one of his films.

Yeo Jin-goo was born in Seoul on August 13, 1997 into an upper middle class family. He grew up with his younger brother. Both brothers were addicted to television shows and films, a taste they had inherited from their father, who too happened to be a big cinema fan.

Around the age of 5, Yeo started pushing his parents about his dreams of appearing in Television shows and movies. This came as a shock to his parents as they wondered how could such a young kid be this serious about his career. Proving that age is just a number, Yeo started auditioning for several roles in Television shows, and the support of his parents was always with him, and his mother would usually take him to the auditions.

Yeo took some informal acting lessons after going through a few failed auditions, but eventually he was selected for the ‘Sad Movie’, where he played the role of Park Hwi-chan. Yeo was 8 years old at that time and was selected from among around 150 child actors.

Yeo went to all boys’ school, which sometime became awkward for him as he became a relatively shy person around girls later. And after he became an actor, he managed his time between his studies and acting projects, eventually graduating from Namgang high school in 2016. Around that time, his film and TV career had picked up the pace rather well but on the insistence of his parents, Yeo went ahead with pursuing his higher education in the Department of Theatre from the prestigious Chung-Ang University in Seoul.

In 2005, Yeo Jin-goo appeared in the film ‘Sad Story’ as an 8 year old, which paved the way for his future film and TV assignments and he didn’t even have to wait much as a good opportunity came his way in the drama series ‘I Want to Love’ in 2006, where he happened to play the role of sick child of a single mother. Although his role was minor and the series itself wasn’t a big deal, Yeo successfully managed to grab the attention of several talent agencies.

In 2006, he played the younger version of the killer in the dark thriller film ‘No Mercy for the Rude’. In 2007, he appeared in two films ‘Santamaria’ and ‘Dance of the Dragon’, and both films brought him further attention.

The year 2008 proved to be a relatively good one for Yeo as he got his hands on his first acting award for his performance in the series’ ‘Iljimae’ and Tazza’. In both the series’, he played the role of the younger version of the lead characters. He received the SBS Best Child Actor Award in the same year.

He also appeared in two big films in 2008 titled ‘A frozen Flower’ and ‘Antique’, and both films went on to become commercial successes. There was a dearth of good roles in 2009 and the only notable that came his way was ‘Swallow the Sun’, a TV series. For his role in the 2010 series ‘Giant’, he immersed himself deeply into the character, and promised to approach all his future acting roles with the same intensity.

By 2011, Yeo had grown up and started playing mostly teenager characters. He appeared in the drama ‘Deep Rooted Tree’, which he did on insistence of actor Jang Hyuk, who had also played the older version of Yeo’s character in the series ‘Tazzo’.