13 Facts About Park Yong-woo

Park Yong-woo's father was an engineering professor and his mother was a music teacher.

Park Yong-woo failed the college entrance exams twice before he was accepted to the prestigious Theater and Film department at Chung-Ang University in 1991.

Park Yong-woo failed twice more when he joined MBC's actor's auditions, then finally passed in 1995.

Park Yong-woo spent a decade playing minor and supporting roles on television and film, notably in Shiri, Ditto and Age of Warriors.

Park Yong-woo later said those ten years of experience enabled him to have greater freedom and control with his acting, and that he believes a person is not just born a good actor, but rather good acting requires much preparation and work, with some luck thrown in.

In 2005, Park Yong-woo drew critical notice with his much-praised portrayal of the influential son of a paper mill owner in Kim Dae-seung's period thriller Blood Rain.

Park Yong-woo won Best Supporting Actor honors at the Chunsa Film Art Awards and the Korean Film Awards, as well as nominations at the Grand Bell Awards and Blue Dragon Film Awards.

Park Yong-woo spent the next several years acting in various genres.

Park Yong-woo played a kindly handyman with a crush on a piano teacher in For Horowitz, a world-weary cop investigating the murders of orphaned girls in The World of Silence, a detective who sacrifices his ethics to pay for his wife's medical bills in Beautiful Sunday, one husband of two partner-swapping married couples in Love Now, and a suave con artist out to steal treasure in Once Upon a Time.

At the press conference of Kim Han-min's 2009 thriller Handphone, Park Yong-woo said he hoped viewers wouldn't interpret the two characters as simply good and evil, but as real people with understandable motivations within the context of their situations.

Loosely based on a real-life person, the protagonist Park Yong-woo played is born a poor butcher's son and becomes Joseon's first surgeon and an independence fighter.

In drama series My Lover, Madame Butterfly, Park Yong-woo played the white knight to a divorced, has-been actress.

Park Yong-woo next appeared in Song Il-gon's Forest of Time, which blurs the boundary between documentary and narrative filmmaking, as Park and Japanese actress Rina Takagi spend ten days searching for the reportedly 7,200-year-old Jomon Sugi, a cryptomeria tree in the renowned forest of Yakushima, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that inspired the Hayao Miyazaki animated film Princess Mononoke.