Lee Jae-in

The risk of shaving her eyebrows

Lee Jae-in did not seek an easy transition when she accepted the dual role in Svaha: The Sixth Finger during 2019. She was fifteen years old and decided to shave her head and eyebrows to play the twins Geum-hwa and "that thing." It was a real physical decision that erased any trace of the child actress who had debuted in 2012 with the series Ice Adonis.

That performance earned her the Best New Actress award at the 2019 Baeksang Arts Awards. But what mattered was not the trophy but her ability to carry a religious horror film opposite actors twice her age. Before that shoot, she had already built up brief appearances in dramas such as Six Flying Dragons in 2015 and Beautiful World in 2019.

The Korean industry often typecasts young actresses as long-suffering daughters or model students. But she broke that pattern from the start. She prefers long silences and steady gazes over the excessive gesturing so common on domestic television.

And it worked.

A change of pace on the badminton court

In 2021 the actress made a leap toward a much brighter tone with Racket Boys. She played Han Se-yoon, an obsessive and competitive badminton player whose training demanded exhausting physical effort. She trained for months so her movements on the court would look professional, because she dislikes it when stunt doubles are obvious on screen.

The series had solid ratings and proved she could carry an ensemble narrative without losing her presence. But she didn't want to stay in the comfort zone of youth drama. During that same period, she appeared in Undercover, a thriller with a much drier and more violent narrative pace.

Many actors of her generation chase fast fame on social media. She keeps a low profile. She focuses on pure craft and on choosing scripts with some uncomfortable edge. Because for Lee Jae-in, film is a precision tool, not a fashion showcase.

Free publicity doesn't interest her.

In 2023 she returned to the big screen with Concrete Utopia, one of the most ambitious productions of the year in South Korea. She shared the set with Lee Byung-hun in a story about human survival after a massive earthquake. Her role as Hye-won added the necessary dose of distrust in an environment where morality crumbles at times.

Maturing in the suspense genre

The year 2023 also brought the premiere of Night Has Come, a teen suspense drama that works as a macabre version of the mafia game. Here, she played Lee Yoon-seo, a girl with an unusual gift for observation. The series was shot on a tight budget compared with the big hits of global streaming platforms, but the tension was sustained thanks to the performances of the young cast.

But the path is not always upward. Production of Hi.5, directed by Kang Hyeong-cheol, suffered considerable delays in its post-production and distribution schedule. It is a project in which she plays a young woman with telekinetic powers, a fantasy range she had not yet explored on a large scale.

In 2024 she joined the cast of Victory, a film set in 1999 about a group of cheerleaders in a small town. The shoot required very specific production design to recreate the visual texture of the late twentieth century. The film premiered in August 2024 with box office earnings that depended largely on the domestic market.

Her contract with the agency Yooborn Company manages a schedule that prioritizes film over mass advertising. Official production records indicate that by the end of 2024, she had already completed more than twenty projects across film and television since her professional debut. Her scenes usually take an average of three takes per shot.