Han Geng 韩庚
At audience events for Ex-Files 4: Marriage Plan, women who had followed Han Geng's career for more than a decade came up to him. They brought their husbands and children, and some, as he recalled, even introduced him to their kids as an uncle. Since his days with the Korean group Super Junior, Han Geng had gone on to play Zhizunbao, the human incarnation of the Monkey King, in A Chinese Odyssey: Part Three, and a boxer in Knockout. His most recognizable role became Meng Yun, the hero of three films about love and breakups.
Han Geng was born on February 9, 1984, into a poor family in Mudanjiang, Heilongjiang Province. He is of Hezhe ethnicity. As a child he loved tinkering with model cars. A schoolteacher who saw him at a concert suggested he take up dancing. At twelve, Han Geng left for Beijing to study folk dance at the school attached to the Central University for Nationalities. His father worked far from home for long stretches, and his mother, to pay for her son's schooling, went to Shenzhen to earn money, where among other things she sold breakfasts. In an interview with Phoenix TV, Han Geng recalled that his mother sent him two hundred yuan a month, and when the money ran out he could live all day on three steamed buns for one yuan.
According to Phoenix TV, in December 2001 he went along with his classmates to an audition that the South Korean company SM Entertainment held in Beijing. The selection wrapped up in spring 2002. As Sina wrote in a piece accompanying an interview with Han Geng, he passed the audition precisely in 2002. Before the contract was signed, he earned money dancing outside shopping malls and in bars, and for a time he taught in his hometown. When the time came to sign the contract, his father read the terms for a long while and asked his son whether he was ready to give the company thirteen years. Han Geng, by his own account, saw only one path for himself then. He left for Korea in 2003. There he learned the language and trained in vocals and dance. As he later recounted, there were times when he would emerge from the basement where he rehearsed only at dawn.
In November 2005 he took the stage as a member of Super Junior. He was the only Chinese among the group's twelve members and the first artist from China to debut in a Korean pop group. Soon it turned out that his visa did not give him the right to perform. According to Han Geng, he himself proposed dancing in a mask so that the others would not have to rework their numbers. In 2008 SM put him at the head of Super Junior-M. This lineup sang in Chinese and performed in China. That same year he carried the Olympic torch through Beijing, and in early 2009 he played a young dancer in the series Stage of Youth.
In December 2009 Han Geng stopped performing with the group and filed a lawsuit in Seoul. He believed the workload was too heavy and that the exclusive contract with SM, set at thirteen years from the release of the first album, was too long. He also disputed the pay terms. In December 2010 the court of first instance ruled in his favor. The company appealed, and in September 2011 it became known that the parties had reached a settlement. Han Geng withdrew the suit. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed. By then he was already performing solo in China. In summer 2010 his first album, Geng Xin (庚心), came out, and around the same time he gave two concerts in a row in Beijing. In 2012, at the MTV Europe Music Awards in Frankfurt, he received the Best Worldwide Act prize on the strength of the audience vote.
Even after dance school, Han Geng had thought about an acting education, but his family, by his account, could not have afforded the tuition. His first big film role came from Gao Xiao-Song in My Kingdom (2011). Han Geng played Meng Erkui, a Peking opera performer who as a child swore to avenge the destruction of his family. Before shooting he trained in voice and martial arts, and Sammo Hung choreographed the fights drawing on his own opera training. Han Geng was stung that the press called the picture a film for the singer's fans. Later he himself admitted that on screen he still fell far short. In Vicki Zhao's directorial debut So Young (2013) he was given Lin Jing, the heroine's calm and seemingly dependable childhood friend, and Tsui Hark in The Taking of Tiger Mountain (2014) gave him a small role as the grandson of one of the participants in the events. It is precisely with this character that the film begins.
In the spring of 2016 Han Geng made the gossip pages after actor Bao Bei-Er's wedding in Bali. In a video that spread online, the groom and several of his friends, Han Geng among them, picked up bridesmaid Ada Liu and tried to throw her into the pool. They were stopped by actress Jia Ling. Bao Bei-Er explained what happened as a failed wedding game and publicly apologized to Ada Liu. The press also recalled Han Geng's own story about how, as a student, he and a friend sold a rented computer. Han Geng publicly apologized for what happened at the wedding and for the misdeeds of his youth, which, he now felt, should not have been told with such ease.
Back in the summer of 2015, HKCinema reported that in A Chinese Odyssey: Part Three Han Geng would replace Stephen Chow. Jeff Lau, who had directed the earlier films too, saw in the reserved Lin Jing from So Young the coldness needed for the role of the Six-Eared Macaque. Han Geng played both him and Jizuibao, the human incarnation of the Monkey King. The director asked him not to imitate Chow. In the HKCinema review, Han Geng's Monkey King was judged quite action-ready, though the film itself fell short compared with the earlier two-parter.
When Tian Yu-Sheng was preparing The Ex-File 3: The Return of the Exes (2017), Han Geng asked him to bear in mind that the characters had already outgrown endless partying. Meng Yun and his girlfriend break up after several years together, and pride keeps each of them from taking the first step toward reconciliation. The film grossed 1.94 billion yuan in China. In Ex-Files 4: Marriage Plan (2023) Meng Yun is dating again and trying to figure out whether he even wants to get married. Han Geng said that for the role he deliberately did not lose weight. In his conception, after the breakup Meng Yun had let himself go, and this was supposed to be noticeable even before he speaks.
On the set of The Great Detective (2019), Han Geng and director Roy Chow got to talking about a film about a boxer. That conversation grew into Knockout (2020). Han Geng played a former champion who, after leaving prison, learns of his wife's death and takes on the care of the daughter born while he was serving his sentence. On set he trained daily with two coaches, worked rounds by the rules of a real fight, and then ran and worked out on machines as well. With the same director he appeared in a long fake beard as the general Guan Yu in Dynasty Warriors (2021), an adaptation of the game based on Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Starting in 2018, he took part in several seasons of a street dance competition on Youku, where he assembled his own team and prepared it for performances.
In Silence of Smoke (2023), the first Chinese film by Japan's Yojiro Takita, Han Geng played the son of a pastry chef who can never bring himself to pass on the secret of the family craft. In the wartime action film Against All Odds (2025) he played the underground operative Huang Shao, who helps save an American pilot in occupied Hong Kong. Han Geng said that from the first day of shooting he kept a small stone in his shoe so that the old wound would show in his character's walk. All the Good Eyes (2026) is set in northeast China, where Han Geng himself is from. According to director Zheng Zhi, Han Geng understood his character Lü Xinkai so well precisely because he had grown up in those parts.
Han Geng first met the Hong Kong actress Celina Jade, known in China as Lu Jingshan, in 2017. They presented an award together at the Golden Rooster ceremony, and afterwards Celina thanked him on social media for helping her down the stairs. They announced their romance on Han Geng's birthday in February 2018, and on December 31, 2019 they married in New Zealand. In September 2022 the couple announced the birth of a daughter, and in October 2025 they posted a family photo and announced that they had had a son.
