Born in 1981 in Köln, Germany, YOO Teo wanted to make a living of his first passion, basketball. Every vacation, he would go to a camp training in a Korean university and was even scouted by a professional team. However, after tearing the cruciate ligaments of one knee in 1998 and those of the other knee in 1999, his doctor told him he was lucky to still be able to walk. That was enough to convince him to give up his sports career altogether. After he took an interest in act...More

Born in 1981 in Köln, Germany, YOO Teo wanted to make a living of his first passion, basketball. Every vacation, he would go to a camp training in a Korean university and was even scouted by a professional team. However, after tearing the cruciate ligaments of one knee in 1998 and those of the other knee in 1999, his doctor told him he was lucky to still be able to walk. That was enough to convince him to give up his sports career altogether. After he took an interest in acting along with other students, he joined his school’s drama club named Chungking Express and started thinking about going to a film school. One year before the end of high school, YOO convinced his parents to let him study in New York for a year as an exchange student. As he was expecting at that point to enter soon a specialized school to become a physical therapist, he thought he might as well try now what he wouldn’t have the occasion to do again later, and that’s with this approach that he took an acting class at the Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute. After two years and a half, unable to renew his visa and having discovered Shakespeare’s repertoire, he applied and was eventually accepted to the intensive courses of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. As his parents were still expecting him to major in physical therapy, he went back to New York to pretend he was studying oriental medicine while he was actually auditioning for roles in theater and films. After receiving mostly stereotypical bit roles, such as that of a delivery man of a Chinese restaurant or a laundromat clerk, he moved to Korea in 2009 to try his chance in the local industry and before long was cast in a minor role in E J-young’s experimental fourth wall-breaking <The Actresses> (2009). His background as the child of Koreans immigrants to Germany helped him land his first main role in <Seoul Searching> (2015), from Benson LEE, about overseas Koreans meeting at a camp in Seoul. After a short appearance in the American <Equals> (2015), YOO explored other opportunities in the Asian markets with supporting roles in the Vietnamese action film <Bitcoin Heist> (2016), in the Thai melodrama <The Moment> (2017) and the China-Indonesia produced <Island Dream> (2017). In 2018, he passed an audition for the role of Russian rock legend Viktor TSOY (who was also of Korean descent) in Kirill SEREBRENNIKOV’s <Leto> (2018), beating more than 2000 hopefuls. It was only after he arrived in Moscow for the shoot that he was told he would have to play most of his lines in Russian, and even sing some of TSOY’s iconic songs. Nevertheless, he managed to learn Russian pronunciation and memorize his lines phonetically by the time shooting started 17 days later, and his performance was eventually met with rave reviews following the screening of the film in Cannes as part of the official competition. He was introduced to a wider Korean audience in 2019 as part of the cast of television fantasy series <Arthdal Chronicles> (2019), in which he made a strong impression.Less