In a rare personal interview ahead of The Assassin(s), the actor opens up about the 2006 accident that nearly ended his ability to walk and why it taught him to meet every crisis with defiant optimism
The Joke Before the Operating Room Doors Closed
Lee Min-ho remembers the exact moment his outlook on life changed. He was 20 years old, lying on a gurney about to be wheeled into surgery, when the doctor turned to his mother and said the words no parent ever wants to hear: he might never walk again. Lee’s response? He looked at his mother and smiled. “Well, I guess I won’t have to do military service.” The doors closed. And then he cried.
“Of course, once I was inside, I was terrified and sobbing,” Lee said in an interview with Sports Kyunghyang at a café in Samcheong-dong, Seoul, on Thursday. “But I wanted to lighten the moment for my mom and honestly, for myself too. When you’re that scared, sometimes humor is the only thing left.”
It’s a story Lee has alluded to before he first spoke publicly about the accident in detail on tvN’s You Quiz on the Block in December 2024 but Thursday’s interview marks the first time he has explicitly connected it to the philosophical foundation that drives his work and his life almost two decades later.
“From that day forward,” he said, “no matter what happens, there’s this baseline inside me that says: find the positive energy, and figure out the next step.”
The Accident That Nearly Ended Everything
In August 2006, Lee Min-ho and his close friend, actor Jung Il-woo, were traveling to Gangwon Province for a vacation. A drunk driver crossed the center line and collided with their vehicle head-on. Two other passengers in the oncoming car were killed. Lee suffered a shattered thighbone and torn cartilage. Jung Il-woo sustained injuries so severe that doctors discovered a previously undetected brain aneurysm.
Lee spent the better part of a year in the hospital. He was 20 an age when most aspiring Korean actors are scrambling for their first decent role. Instead, he was learning to walk again.
Three years later, he starred in Boys Over Flowers (2009). The drama became a cultural phenomenon across Asia and launched him into a stratosphere of fame that, nearly two decades on, he has never really left.
The gap between those two moments the hospital bed and the Baeksang Arts Award for Best New Actor is the emotional core of everything Lee Min-ho has built since. And it explains something that colleagues and fans have always noted about him: an almost preternatural calm in the face of pressure, setbacks, and the relentless scrutiny that comes with being one of the most recognizable actors in Asia.
From Hospital Beds to the Biggest Stages
Lee’s career since Boys Over Flowers reads like a masterclass in strategic longevity. City Hunter (2011). The Heirs (2013). The Legend of the Blue Sea (2016). Each cemented his status as a leading man whose appeal transcended Korean borders long before “Hallyu” became a global marketing term.
After completing his military service in 2019, he returned with The King: Eternal Monarch (2020), then made a pivotal leap into international prestige with Apple TV+’s Pachinko (2022), playing the morally complex Hansu across a multi-generational saga based on Min Jin Lee’s bestselling novel. The role required him to perform in Korean, Japanese, and English a multilingual challenge that signaled his ambitions had outgrown the K-drama format.
In 2025, he starred alongside Gong Hyo-jin in the Netflix space romance When the Stars Gossip Korea’s first space-station romantic comedy and anchored the blockbuster fantasy Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy opposite Ahn Hyo-seop. At 39, with 95 million combined social media followers and nearly two decades of unbroken relevance, Lee Min-ho has achieved something vanishingly rare in Korean entertainment: he remains a genuine box-office and ratings draw without ever having been eclipsed by a younger generation.
The 2006 accident is part of that story. Not because it made him famous that came from talent, timing, and relentless work but because it gave him a framework for processing the pressure that fame brings.
The Assassin(s): History, Conspiracy, and a New Kind of Role
The interview was timed to the release of Lee’s latest film, The Assassin(s) (암살자(들)), which opens in Korean theaters on September 23.
Directed by Hur Jin-ho (Christmas in August, The Astronomer), the film dramatizes one of the darkest chapters in modern Korean history: the assassination of First Lady Yuk Young-soo on August 15, 1974 Korea’s Liberation Day. During a nationally televised ceremony, a man named Mun Se-gwang, a Korean resident of Japan with ties to North Korea, charged the stage and fired at President Park Chung-hee. The president survived. His wife, seated behind him, did not.
The incident was broadcast live to the nation. Yuk was 49 years old and widely beloved her death sent South Korea into mourning and set off a cascade of political consequences that shaped the country’s authoritarian trajectory for years to come. To this day, unresolved questions persist about unaccounted-for bullets, missing audio evidence, and the full scope of government involvement in suppressing details of the investigation.
The Assassin(s) is the first film to dramatize this event directly. While it does not use the real names of the historical figures, it blends authenticated records with creative interpretation to explore what happened in the aftermath the cover-ups, the conspiracy theories, and the individuals who tried to uncover the truth. Lee Min-ho’s role is reported to place him at the center of the investigation, pursuing the suspicions and hidden motives behind the assassination.
It is, by some distance, the most politically weighty project of his career a departure from the romantic leads and genre spectacles that have defined his filmography. For an actor who has spoken openly about seeking “adult sexiness” and greater dramatic gravity in his roles, The Assassin(s) represents exactly the kind of calculated risk that keeps a career evolving at 39.
Why Optimism Isn’t Naïveté
What’s most striking about Lee’s interview isn’t the accident itself the broad strokes have been public for years. It’s his insistence that the positivity he draws from it isn’t a performance or a coping mechanism, but a genuine restructuring of how he processes reality. “I’m someone who has a strong desire to reverse even the most tragic situations with wit,” he said. “That light-hearted comment to my mother wasn’t just for her it was me trying to comfort myself, because I was just as terrified.”
In a Korean entertainment industry where many stars carefully project invulnerability, Lee’s willingness to describe his own fear crying alone behind operating room doors at 20 and then trace a direct line from that vulnerability to the creative confidence he carries today feels notably honest.
It also reframes his entire filmography. The ease, the warmth, the famous smile none of it came naturally. It was built on the other side of a moment when a doctor said he might not walk again, and a 20-year-old kid decided that if humor was the only weapon he had left, he’d use it.
The Assassin(s) opens September 23.