Stage, screen and TV actor CHO Jae-hyun debuted in 1989 at the age of 25, when he passed the annual KBS actor’s audition. In 1991, CHO picked up numerous Best New Actors for his role in Slicing Sadness with a Knife in My Heart. In the mid-1990s CHO began what would become a lengthy collaboration with maverick filmmaker KIM Ki-duk on his debut Crocodile (1996) and his follow-up Wild Animals (1997). Switching between the arthouse and mainstream, CHO has appeared as a leading...More

Stage, screen and TV actor CHO Jae-hyun debuted in 1989 at the age of 25, when he passed the annual KBS actor’s audition. In 1991, CHO picked up numerous Best New Actors for his role in Slicing Sadness with a Knife in My Heart. In the mid-1990s CHO began what would become a lengthy collaboration with maverick filmmaker KIM Ki-duk on his debut Crocodile (1996) and his follow-up Wild Animals (1997). Switching between the arthouse and mainstream, CHO has appeared as a leading man in numerous productions since the start of the millennium, including KANG Woo-suk’s Hanbando (2006), IM Kwon-taek’s Beyond the Years (2007), JEON Kyu-hwan’s The Weight (2012), JEON Soo-il’s El Condor Pasa (2012) and more films by KIM Ki-duk such as The Isle (2000), Bad Guy (2001), Address Unknown (2001) and Moebius (2013). CHO took on new roles in the film industry in 2009 when he became chairman of the Gyeonggi Film Council and executive festival director of the DMZ International Documentary Film Festival. Yet throughout this time he remained active as a performer, appearing in mainstream fare such as <Mokpo, Gangster’s Paradise> (2004), <Hanbando> (2006) and the period hit <The Fatal Encounter> (2014), in which he had a memorable part as a sinister criminal, and many lower budgets films, including IM Kwon-taek’s <Beyond the Years> (2007), JEON Kyu-hwan’s <The Weight> (2012), for which he won a Best Actor award at Fantasia for playing a hunchbacked mortician, JEON Soo-il’s <El Condor Pasa> (2012) and KIM Ki-duk’s notorious silent castration drama <Moebius> (2013). Following this string of indies CHO returned to the commercial realm with a showy role in period action-thriller <The Fatal Encounter> in 2014. The following year he once agin teamed up with JEON Soo-il for <A Korean in Paris> and made his feature debut as a director with the indie title <A Break Alone>, both films screened in Busan in the fall.Less