Nam Joo-hyuk
Nam Joo-hyuk is an actor, born 1994.
Nam Joo-hyuk modelled before he acted, and the transition was not instant. His screen debut came in 2014 with the television series Idle Mermaid, and it took the school drama Who Are You: School 2015 and then Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok-joo in 2016 to turn him into a name. Weightlifting Fairy is still the reference point: as Jung Joon-hyung he was asked to be goofy rather than glossy, and he was better at it than a model turned actor is supposed to be.
The years since have been a deliberate campaign against typecasting, with mixed but improving results. He went historical in Scarlet Heart: Ryeo, mythological in The Bride of Habaek, and took his film debut in the 2018 historical epic The Great Battle. Start-Up in 2020 gave him a lead as Nam Do-san, and Twenty Five Twenty One in 2022 gave him the best-written part of his career as Baek Yi-jin.
He was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2021. More recently he has pushed harder and darker, into the vigilante thriller Vigilante and the film Remember, which suggests someone who would rather be a character actor with a leading man's face than a leading man.
Movies (3)
TV (15)
- The East Palace (2026)
- Vigilante (2023)
- Scarlet Heart: Ryeo (2016)
- Start-Up (2020)
- Twenty Five Twenty One (2022)
- Unexpected Business (2021)
- Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok-joo (2016)
- Who Are You: School 2015 (2015)
- Candy in My Ear (2016)
- The School Nurse Files (2020)
- The Light in Your Eyes (2019)
- Coffee Friends (2019)
- The Bride of Habaek (2017)
- Three Meals a Day: Mountain Village (2019)
- Idle Mermaid (2014)
Where to start with Nam Joo-hyuk
Watch Twenty Five Twenty One before anything else. It is the best thing he has been in and the best he has been in anything, a long-form romance that gives Baek Yi-jin room to age, and it will tell you quickly whether you want the rest. If you would rather start light, Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok-joo is the charm offensive that made him famous and it holds up.
From there the branches are clean. Start-Up for the glossy contemporary lead; Scarlet Heart: Ryeo for the historical costume version; The Great Battle if you want him on a film scale, in armour. The recent swing is Vigilante, much colder and much more violent than anything above it, and Josée is the quiet one, a small film that asks him to do less and gets more.