Lee Byung-hun is a South Korean actor. He has received acclaim for his work in a wide range of genres, most notably Joint Security Area (2000); A Bittersweet Life (2005); The Good, the Bad, the Weird (2008); I Saw the Devil (2010); Masquerade (2012); and the television series Iris (2009) and Mr. Sunshine (2018). His critically acclaimed film Inside Men (2015) won him the Best Actor prize at the three most prestigious South Korean award ceremonies: 52nd Baeksang Arts Awards, 37th Blue Dragon Film Awards and 53rd Grand Bell Awards. Lee has seven films—Joint Security Area, The Good, the Bad, the Weird, Masquerade, Inside Men, Master, Ashfall and The Man Standing Next—on the list of the highest-grossing films in South Korea. Lee was Gallup Korea's Actor of the Year in the Film division in 2012 and in the Television division in 2018. In 2021, he appeared in a recurring role as the Front Man in the Netflix hit survival series Squid Game.

Joint Security Area is a 2000 South Korean mystery thriller film directed and co-written by Park Chan-wook and based on the novel DMZ by Park Sang-yeon. It is Park Chan-wook's third film as director; as he largely disowned his first two films The Moon Is... the Sun's Dream (1992) and Trio (1997), Joint Security Area is frequently regarded as his first film with creative control, and Park himself prefers the film to be regarded as his directorial debut.