Lee Jun-young
BIOGRAPHY
Lee Jun-young (Korean: 이준영; born 22 January 1997 in Uijeongbu, South Korea), also known as Jun, is a South Korean singer, rapper and actor with forty-seven screen credits. He attended Pai Chai University.
He debuted on 2 June 2014 as a member of the boy band U-KISS. On 28 October 2017 he joined the survival programme The Unit and won it, becoming the centre and main vocalist of the project group UNB, in which he was a member from April 2018 to January 2019. In 2021, after more than seven years with U-KISS, he let his contract end and left the group to concentrate on acting.
His acting debut came in 2017 with Avengers Social Club, where he played Lee Soo-gyum. In 2019 he was Yoo Beom-jin in Class of Lies. The rest of the list reads D.P. and Imitation (2021), Love and Leashes (2022), Mask Girl (2023), and When Life Gives You Tangerines and Weak Hero Class 2 (2025), the last as Geum Sung-je.
Two of his awards line up neatly with that timeline. He took Best New Actor at the 2018 MBC Drama Awards for Goodbye to Goodbye, only a year after his acting debut and while UNB was still active. The Best Acting Performance Award at the 2023 Asia Artist Awards came two years after he left U-KISS to concentrate on acting.
He was announced as a new member of U-KISS on 15 May 2014 and debuted with the group on its ninth mini album Mono Scandal. The group’s last Korean comeback with him was the eleventh mini album Stalker in 2016, and his contract ended in June 2021. During the group years he also appeared in the musicals ON AIR ~ Night Flight ~ and RUN TO YOU ~ Street Life ~ in 2015, and later in Swag Age: Shout out, Chosun! in 2019 and 2020.
On television he played Han Min-soo in Goodbye to Goodbye (MBC, 2018), Kang Woo-won in Good Casting (SBS, 2020), Kwon Ryok in Imitation (KBS2, 2021), Yoon Tae-in in Let Me Be Your Knight (SBS, 2021 to 2022) and Kim Tae-hee in May I Help You? (MBC, 2022). He was Kang In-ha in The Impossible Heir (Disney+, 2024), Moon Cha-min in Dreaming of a Freaking Fairytale (TVING, 2024) and, in 2025, Hong Si-jun in Melo Movie and Park Yeong-beom in When Life Gives You Tangerines, both for Netflix, and Do Hyeon-jeong in Pump Up the Healthy Love (KBS2). He also appeared as Jung Hyun-min in a cameo in D.P.
His films include Love and Leashes (2022) as Jung Ji-hoo, Brave Citizen (2023) as Han Soo-gang and Badland Hunters (2024) as Choi Ji-wan. His other honours include Best New Actor at the 2018 Korea Musical Awards for Swag Age: Shout out, Chosun! and the Best Choice Award for an actor at the 2021 Asia Artist Awards. The same ceremony gave him the Best Actor Award in 2022 for May I Help You?. Weak Hero Class 2 brought Best Supporting Male Performer on OTT at the 2025 Fundex Awards. Pump Up the Healthy Love earned him an Excellence Award for an actor in a miniseries at the 2025 KBS Drama Awards.
In tvN’s 2026 music drama Four Hands, Two Sonatas (포핸즈) he plays Choi Jeong-yo, a pianist from a difficult family background who let his talent go and then runs into the prodigy he was once fixated on, across all twelve episodes.
Lee Jun-young’s music career began in 2014 and his acting career in 2017, and the two ran side by side until he left U-KISS in 2021.
In Four Hands, Two Sonatas, a twelve-episode tvN drama aired with Tving carrying it domestically, he plays Choi Jeong-yo in every episode.
The years 2017 and 2018 were dense. He began acting in 2017 with Avengers Social Club, entered The Unit on 28 October of that year, and was a member of UNB from April 2018, all while still belonging to U-KISS. The MBC Best New Actor award for Goodbye to Goodbye arrived in the same 2018 season, so three activities overlapped inside roughly twelve months. UNB itself lasted from April 2018 to January 2019, nine months. The second half of the list is cleaner: after the 2021 departure, each year carries acting credits only, with two titles in 2021, D.P. and Imitation, and two again in 2025, When Life Gives You Tangerines and Weak Hero Class 2. The pianist he plays in 2026 returns a singer and rapper to a role built around music.
In my view his career is easiest to understand as a slow shift of weight from the stage to the camera. The theatre credits came first and the group years gave him a public profile, and the years since 2021 have gone almost entirely to acting. What stayed with me is how different the parts are from one another. A cameo in D.P. sits far from the lead in Love and Leashes. If you are coming to him through Four Hands, Two Sonatas, I would watch Love and Leashes next to see him in a very different register.
PROFILE DETAILS
- Native Name
- 이준영
- Real Name
- Lee Jun-young
- Nickname
- Jun
- Pronouns
- he/him
- Born
- (Age 29)
- Birthplace
- Uijeongbu, South Korea
- Gender
- Male
- Western Zodiac
- Aquarius ♒
- Chinese Zodiac
- Rat 🐭
- Nationality
- Debut
- 2014 · U-KISS (2014, as a group member)
- Years Active
- 2014-present
- Languages
- Korean
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