Son Suk-ku has revealed that he forged his parents’ official seal to secretly volunteer for deployment to Iraq during his mandatory military service, a confession he made on the October 23 broadcast of the SBS variety show ‘무엇이든 해줄지니-비서진’.
According to Korean media reports from outlets including Money Today and MK Sports, the actor appeared as a guest on the program’s eighth episode. When fellow cast member Kim Kwang-kyu asked whether he had volunteered for the Iraq deployment, Son answered, “I went because I wanted to go.”
Son said his parents opposed the idea, and the application required his parents’ seal. He had a copy of the seal made at a shop near Army headquarters, submitted his application, and only told his parents after he had been accepted. Recalling the phone call, he said he joked, “If I told you now that I forged the seal, I’d be sent to the guardhouse” — and used the line to win them over. “I still can’t forget my father’s sigh over the phone,” he added.
The story reaches back to the years before Son became an actor. He spent much of his youth in the United States, where he also attended university, and enlisted in the Korean Army just one or two months after returning to Korea. Still unfamiliar with the language and its customs, he said he was scolded constantly — for how he spoke, how he walked, even how he clapped. He responded by throwing himself into training and graduated at the top of his trainee class. The Iraq deployment, he explained, grew out of a simple wish “to go as far as I could as a soldier.”
The deployment also changed his life financially: he earned more than 12 million won during the tour and used the money to move to Vancouver to study acting — the first step toward a career that later brought him leading roles in “My Liberation Notes” and Netflix’s “D.P.”
The confession offers one of the most candid glimpses yet into Son’s life before acting — a past he has rarely discussed in such detail.
