Jung Hae-in Filmography and His Ancestor, Jeong Yak-yong

Jung Hae-in was born on April 1, 1988, in Seoul, and he did not become an actor quickly. He decided on it during his military service, dropped a significant amount of weight to pursue it, signed with FNC Entertainment after his discharge, and made his television debut at twenty-six — late by the standards of an industry that often starts people at nineteen.

Then he spent three more years in roles most viewers did not register. Bodyguards. Younger brothers. A vampire drama that did not land. If you had asked a Korean audience in 2016 who Jung Hae-in was, most would not have had an answer.

Jung Hae-in’s Korean dramas in order

2014 — The Three Musketeers (삼총사), tvN — as Ahn Min-seo

2015 — Blood (블러드), KBS2 — as Joo Hyun-woo

2016 — That’s the Way It Is (그래, 그런거야), SBS — as Yoo Se-joon

2016–17 — Night Light (불야성), MBC — as Tak

2017 — While You Were Sleeping (당신이 잠든 사이에), SBS — as Han Woo-tak

2017–18 — Prison Playbook (슬기로운 감빵생활), tvN — as Captain Yoo Jeong-woo

2018 — Something in the Rain (밥 잘 사주는 예쁜 누나), JTBC — as Seo Joon-hee

2019 — One Spring Night (봄밤), MBC — as Yoo Ji-ho

2020 — A Piece of Your Mind (반의반), tvN — as Moon Ha-won

2021–23 — D.P. (Deserter Pursuit), Netflix, seasons 1–2 — as Ahn Jun-ho

2022 — Connect (커넥트), Disney+ — as Ha Dong-soo

2024 — Love Next Door (엄마친구아들), tvN — as Choi Seung-hyo

2026 — Our Sticky Love (이런 엿같은 사랑), Netflix — as Jang Tae-ha

His Cameo appearances: Reply 1988 (ep. 13, 2015) and Guardian: The Lonely and Great God (eps. 7–8, 2016), where he played Kim Go-eun’s first love — a two-episode part that got more attention than most of his credited roles up to that point.

What actually happened across his K-Dramas

The first four are apprenticeship. The Three Musketeers put him in a historical costume, where reviewers first noticed his voice; That’s the Way It Is was a fifty-four-episode family drama from one of Korea’s most established writers, and it won him a New Star Award at the SBS Drama Awards. Night Light gave him a real supporting part as a bodyguard, and almost nobody saw it.

While You Were Sleeping in 2017 changed that. As a young police officer in a fantasy about premonitory dreams, he became the number-one search term on Naver, Korea’s dominant portal. Prison Playbook came almost immediately after and was more interesting, because it was ugly: an army captain jailed for assaulting a soldier under his command who later died. It won him Most Popular Actor at the Baeksang Arts Awards.

Something in the Rain in 2018 was his first lead, opposite Son Ye-jin, and it made him a Hallyu name across Asia. One Spring Night the following year, from the same director, cast him as a pharmacist raising a child alone. Those two dramas built the image that still follows him — soft-spoken, decent, slightly wounded.

A Piece of Your Mind in 2020 is the one nobody lists. Ratings collapsed into the one percent range and the sixteen-episode order was compressed to twelve. Filmographies are more useful when they include the failures.

D.P. in 2021 is the hinge. Playing a conscript assigned to a Deserter Pursuit unit, he anchored a Netflix series about abuse inside the Korean military that became a national conversation rather than a hit show. He has said in fan meetings that it is his favorite of his own work.

Snowdrop, which aired that winter, drew sustained public criticism in Korea over its 1987 setting and premise — a controversy about the script rather than his performance, but a real part of the record. Connect, directed by the Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike for Disney+, put him in body horror.

Love Next Door in 2024 was his first outright romantic comedy. Our Sticky Love, released on Netflix on August 7, 2026, is the second, opposite Ha Young.

Jung Hae-in’s films in order

2014 — The Youth (레디액션 청춘), an indie omnibus — as Park Man-jae

2015 — Salut d’Amour (장수상회), feature — as the young Kim Sung-chil

2016 — The Moon of Seoul (서울의 달), short film — as Ji Pyung

2017 — The King’s Case Note (임금님의 사건수첩), feature — as Heuk-woon

2017 — Conspiracy: Age of Rebellion (역모: 반란의 시대), feature, lead role — as Kim Ho

2018 — Heung-boo: The Revolutionist (흥부), feature — as King Heonjong

2019 — Tune in for Love (유열의 음악앨범), feature — as Cha Hyeon-woo

2019 — Start-Up (시동), feature — as Woo Sang-pil

2021 — Unframed – “Blue Happiness” (언프레임드), short film — as Park Chae-young

2024 — I, the Executioner (베테랑 2), feature — as Park Seon-woo

His Cameo appearances: P1H: The Beginning of a New World (2020) and 12.12: The Day (서울의 봄, 2023), where he appears as Major Oh Jin-ho. The second is billed as a special appearance but is one of the most remembered performances in a film that sold over thirteen million tickets, so viewers looking for his work should not skip it.

The films tell a different story than the dramas

Tune in for Love in 2019 won him Best New Actor at the Grand Bell Awards and nominations at the Blue Dragon, Buil and Chunsa awards. It is period romance, and it sits comfortably beside the television image.

I, the Executioner in 2024 does not. Ryoo Seung-wan cast him as the young officer who turns out to be the film’s antagonist, and Korean audiences watched an actor they had filed under gentle do something genuinely cold. He won Best Supporting Actor at the Blue Dragon Film Awards for it, along with the Popular Star Award, and took a Baeksang nomination the following year.

So the career has two clean halves. Before D.P., he was a romantic lead who was very good at being decent. After it, he is an actor who can be trusted with damage.

Why his family history resurfaced in August 2026

Jung Hae-in has spoken about his ancestry before. He is a sixth-generation direct descendant of Jeong Yak-yong, one of the most important thinkers in Korean history, through Jeong Yak-yong’s second son, Jeong Hak-yu. The line is documented in the clan genealogy: Jeong Yak-yong to Jeong Hak-yu, then Jeong Dae-cho, Jeong Chun-seop, Jeong Gyu-jik, Jeong Sang-jin, and Jung Hae-in.

A note on the spelling, because it looks like an error and is not one. The two men share a surname — 丁, the Naju Jeong clan — and under South Korea’s own romanization standard it is Jeong in both cases. The actor is the exception, and the exception is his to make: Korean personal names are romanized however the individual chooses, and “Jung Hae-in” is what appears on his passport and on every credit he has ever had.

You may also run into “Chŏng Yagyong” in English reference works, including the English Wikipedia entry. That is McCune-Reischauer, a system devised by two Western scholars in 1939 and used officially in South Korea until July 2000, when the government replaced it with the current Revised Romanization. Koreans have not written the surname that way for a quarter of a century. If you are choosing a spelling, use Jeong or Jung. 정약용 is ㅈ (J) not ㅊ (Ch).

He talked about it on the tvN show You Quiz on the Block in October 2024. He said he had grown up hearing about it from his grandparents and that it had not meant much to him as a child; he only went and read properly once he became interested in history, and then felt a responsibility to be careful about how he behaved. In 2022 he recorded the audio guide for the Jeong Yak-yong historic site in Namyangju, outside Seoul.

None of that was news. What made it news again was that the co-star of his current Netflix series, Ha Young, mentioned her own great-grandfather on a talk show on August 7, 2026 — the day Our Sticky Love was released (more info) — and the family history that surfaced afterwards concerned collaboration with Japanese colonial rule. Korean outlets ran the two leads of the same drama side by side. One descended from a reformer who spent eighteen years in internal exile writing about how officials exploit ordinary people; the other from a family whose record went the other way.

Jung Hae-in’s ancestor: who was Jeong Yak-yong?

Jeong Yak-yong (1762–1836), usually called by his pen name Dasan, is one of the two or three most important thinkers Korea has produced, and the man who brought the reformist tradition called Silhak — practical learning — to its fullest expression. He entered the elite Gyujanggak scholarly corps under the reformist King Jeongjo and was, for about a decade, one of the most useful men in the country.

The engineer

Working from an illustrated Chinese engineering manual, he designed a pulley-based hoist and a windlass that let a small crew raise heavy stone. Hwaseong Fortress in Suwon, projected to take roughly a decade, was finished in two years and nine months, and it is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. He also designed the pontoon bridge of linked boats that carried the king’s procession across the Han River, a problem the court had failed to solve cheaply for years.

The engineering matters less than the attitude behind it. Men of his class were not supposed to concern themselves with lifting equipment or with the load-bearing capacity of moored boats. He did the calculations himself, which tells you most of what you need to know about him.

Eighteen years in exile

Jeongjo died in 1800, and in 1801 the persecution of Catholics tore the family apart. One brother was executed as a martyr. Another was exiled to an island in the far southwest, where he compiled a startlingly precise catalogue of marine life before dying there, still banished. Jeong Yak-yong was sent to Gangjin, at the southern edge of the peninsula, and barred from office for life. His sons were disqualified from the state examinations.

He stayed eighteen years, eventually settling at a hillside cottage now known as Dasan Chodang, taught local students, and wrote more than five hundred volumes.

One object from those years says more than the page count. His wife sent him, from home, the faded red silk of the skirt she had worn at their wedding. He cut it up and wrote letters to their sons on it — on conduct, on study, on how to live as the children of a disgraced house. The surviving album is now a designated national treasure.

What he wrote

Three works are usually grouped together as his major statement. Gyeongse Yupyo is a blueprint for reforming the entire apparatus of the state — offices, land, taxation. Mokminsimseo, the most famous, is a manual for provincial magistrates that doubles as an indictment: it sets out in detail how officials inflate taxes, how clerks skim, and how the burden lands on people with no means of resisting, all of it watched first-hand in Gangjin. Heumheum Sinseo, the least known abroad and arguably the most remarkable, is a study of how to investigate and adjudicate deaths so that the wrong person is not executed.

Beyond those he proposed that villages hold and work farmland in common and divide the harvest according to labour contributed; compiled a medical text on measles that introduced Jenner’s smallpox vaccination to Korean readers, having lost several of his own children young; and produced a historical geography of Korea’s ancient territories along with a work correcting misused vocabulary. The range is the point. He treated engineering, criminal procedure, epidemiology, land tenure and philology as one job.

Why he is decisive, not merely prolific

In a short essay called Wonmok he asks a direct question: does the magistrate exist for the people, or the people for the magistrate? His answer is that rulers were raised up from below, because people needed them and agreed to them. In a companion piece he pushes it further — what the people set up, the people may set aside.

That was written under a monarchy, by a man who had served the king, while exiled and stripped of any prospect of implementing a word of it. He wrote the reform plan for a country that had no use for him.

He was released in 1818 and lived quietly at the family home in Namyangju until 1836, composing his own epitaph. He died on the sixtieth anniversary of his wedding day.

Where to start with Jung Hae-in

If you want the romance he is known for, begin with Something in the Rain and follow it with One Spring Night. If you want to know why Korean critics take him seriously, start with D.P. and then watch I, the Executioner, in that order, because the second only registers properly if you have seen the first. Prison Playbook is the underrated one — he is only part of an ensemble, but it is where the coldness he would use fifteen years later first shows up. Our Sticky Love is the current one, and it is the lightest thing he has done in years.

The healing point

Look at what Jeong Yak-yong could see from where he was standing.

Eighteen years locked away in a place of exile. Banned from holding office for life. One brother executed, another dead on an island, still banished. Sons who were not allowed to sit the exams that would have given them a future. Not one of his ideas put into practice. He wrote for eighteen years with no readers, and no reason to believe he would ever have any.

By every measure available to him at the time, that life did not work.

Now look at it from here. His ideas are taught in Korean schools. His house is a museum. The fortress he helped raise is a UNESCO World Heritage site. The essays he wrote in exile are read as the start of an argument Korea is still having about what government is for. And two hundred years later a descendant, six generations down, stood in a recording booth in Namyangju and read that life out loud for people visiting on a Saturday.

He was not there for any of it. He never knew.

A life is longer than the lifetime it happens in. The verdict people reach about you while you are alive is not the final one, and it is often not the accurate one.

Jeong Yak-yong was not a failure who got lucky later. He was doing the most valuable work of his century the whole time, in a room where nobody was watching. The work was already good. Nobody knew it yet, and being known is the slowest part of all - the part you cannot do anything about.

So the useful question is not whether anyone is watching you now. It is what you would be doing if the answer were no. Jeong Yak-yong answered that question for eighteen years, and his answer is the reason anyone still says his name.

You will not be there when someone reads your life. Live the kind of life you would want them to find.

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Sources

Filmography: Korean and English Wikipedia entries for Jung Hae-in, cross-checked; cameo classifications follow the credited billing.

Ancestry: tvN, You Quiz on the Block (October 9, 2024); Hankyung and Money Today coverage of that broadcast; Sports Kyunghyang on the Naju Jeong clan lineage.

Awards: Blue Dragon Film Awards (2024), Grand Bell Awards (2020), Baeksang Arts Awards (2018, 2025), SBS Drama Awards (2016).

Jeong Yak-yong: standard scholarship on Dasan and the Silhak tradition; Hwaseong Fortress construction records; the Jeong Yak-yong historic site, Namyangju.