Jung Jae-young started his career taking minor roles in films ranging from his debut The Adventures of Mrs. Park to Green Fish, The Quiet Family, and Die Bad. However throughout this period he was primarily occupied with works by director/playwright Jang Jin, both on the stage and in minor roles for the films The Happenings and The Spy.

Jung’s first prominent film role came in Jang Jin’s third film Guns & Talks, where he played one member of the film’s central quartet of assassins. Shortly after that he turned in a memorable performance as a ruthless, cruel-minded hustler in Ryoo Seung-wan’s No Blood No Tears. Around this time he began to be associated in audience’s minds with tough, intense, masculine characters who would start a fight at the slightest provocation. His role as a death row convict turned soldier in the record-breaking Silmido marked the height of this stage of his career.

Nonetheless it would be Jang Jin who would again set him off in new creative directions. His acclaimed performance in Jang’s romantic comedy Someone Special provided him with his first lead role and drove home the point that Jung had much more acting range than most people realized. In the smash hit Welcome to Dongmakgol (based on one of Jang Jin’s plays which Jung had also performed in), he once again showed a more sensitive side as a war-weary North Korean officer who befriends his counterparts from the South. Jung further displayed his versatility as a shy rural farmer who travels to Uzbekistan in the hopes of finding a wife in Wedding Campaign; a betrayed gangster in Righteous Ties; a cop during a bank robbery drill gone awry in Going by the Book; a CEO under investigation in Public Enemy Returns; a Joseon merchant who gets drawn into plans for developing a rocket against the Ming Dynasty in The Divine Weapon; a suicidal man who finds himself washed up and stranded on an uninhabited island in Castaway on the Moon; a sinister 70-year-old village elder in the film adaptation of the popular webcomic Moss; a fading baseball star who is forced to coach a team of hearing-impaired kids in GLove; a cold-hearted debt collector who needs a transplant in Countdown; a detective facing off against a bestselling novelist who makes a Confession of Murder; an obsessive-compulsive who falls for a carefree musician in rom-com The Plan Man; a father tracking down his daughter’s killers in Broken; and an undercover assassin who tries to protect King Jeongjo in The Fatal Encounter. In 2015, Jung was cast in his first ever television series as a welder-turned-rookie lawmaker in political drama Assembly.