Lee Min-ho shines as documentary presenter

Actor Lee Min-ho from MBC's documentary "DMZ, the Wild" /Courtesy of MBC

By Park Jin-hai

Actor Lee Min-ho, a big name hallyu star rarely seen outside movies and TV dramas, has been working hard to become a documentary presenter.

In MBC's three-part documentary "DMZ, the Wild," which aired its first episode in April and second last Monday, Lee wanders in the South side of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), a four-kilometer-wide stretch of land that separates the two Koreas, and introduces the wildlife flourishing there where human access has been forbidden since the 1953 Korean Armistice Agreement.

Although celebrities participating in documentaries as narrators have become commonplace, it has been unprecedented for a celebrity to take an active part in filming.

Lee appears in the documentary to raise awareness for endangered wildlife species, he accompanied the production team in the DMZ throughout filming for a year-and-a-half between October 2015 and March this year. He camps out in freezing temperatures as low as minus 20 degrees Celsius and waits for eight hours until he sees a wild boar; and shows rare footage of nature, including cannibalization among the wild boars.

"There is a place like this a few hours away from Seoul. Even though I'm Korean, I didn't know much about this place," Lee said in the episode.

The star of the SBS fantasy drama "The Legend of the Blue Sea" has been serving his mandatory military duty since May and the documentary was his last project before his enlistment.

The second episode showed wild animals' fierce wars for survival including a black woodpecker fighting to keep its nest from other birds and squirrels.

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