Born and raised in Jakjeon-dong, Gyeyang-gu, Incheon, South Korea,[1] Yoo is the younger of two siblings, he later claimed that his family had been poor.

[6] He rose to stardom in his first film The Way Home, playing a bratty city boy who learns to appreciate country life when he's forced to spend the summer with his deaf-mute grandmother.

[9] Thereafter, Yoo also starred in animal movie Hearty Paws (2006) about a boy and his beloved dog, and Unforgettable (2008) about school children from a remote island who go on a field trip to a candy factory in Seoul during the 1970s.

[16] In his teens, Yoo was cast in one of the major roles in Master of Study (2010), a Korean screen adaptation of Japanese manga Dragon Zakura.

[17][18][19] He then played a more mature role in Flames of Desire, as the second-generation son of a wealthy chaebol family who is uninterested in the battles of succession among his relatives and becomes a married man at 21.

In 2011, Yoo trained in swordplay and martial arts in his role as an assassin in Warrior Baek Dong-soo, an action-period drama based on the manhwa by Lee Jae-heon.

[30][31] Following that, Yoo's first photo book titled Travel Letter, Spring Snow, And... was published; it was the last project shot by celebrity photographer Bori before her death on April 9, 2013.

[45] In 2023, Yoo returned to the small screen with his first streaming project,[46] Wavve's crime thriller The Deal portraying a completely different character than his previous ones - a financially struggling young man who accidentally kidnaps his school friend for a 10 billion won ransom.

[47] The mini-series was the only Korean drama[48] invited to the third edition of the Red Sea International Film Festival in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, one of the most prestigious events in the world of cinema.