Choi Min-sik
Choi Min-sik is an actor, born 1962.
Choi Min-sik (born 1962) came up through Korean television and got his first real recognition on The Moon of Seoul in 1994, then broke through in film with Shiri (1999), the hit that established him as a leading man. Four years later Oldboy made him internationally famous and won him Best Actor at the Baeksang Arts Awards, the Blue Dragon Film Awards and the Grand Bell Awards.
The thing he does better than almost anyone is exhaustion. Choi plays men who have been running on rage long enough to have lost the knack of performing normality, and he lets the effort show in the face and the breathing rather than the volume. It works in I Saw the Devil, where he is the one being hunted, and it works in a completely different key in The Admiral: Roaring Currents, which became the highest grossing film ever released in South Korea and won him the Grand Prize at the 51st Baeksang Arts Awards.
Hollywood came calling in 2014 with a supporting part in Lucy, the same year Gallup Korea named him Film Actor of the Year. He stayed with Korean cinema for the work that mattered afterwards, in Forbidden Dream (2019) and Exhuma (2024), and returned to television with Big Bet. For an actor whose most famous role is built on physical punishment, the late career has been notably unhurried.
Movies (31)
- Exhuma (2024)
- Oldboy (2003)
- Lucy (2014)
- I Saw the Devil (2010)
- New World (2013)
- Lady Vengeance (2005)
- Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War (2004)
- Happy End (1999)
- Nameless Gangster (2012)
- The Tiger (2015)
- The Admiral: Roaring Currents (2014)
- Shiri (1999)
- The Battle: Roar to Victory (2019)
- The Quiet Family (1998)
- Forbidden Dream (2019)
- Chihwaseon (2002)
- Leafie, a Hen Into the Wild (2011)
- Ari Ari the Korean Cinema (2012)
- Crying Fist (2005)
- The Mayor (2017)
- Heart Blackened (2017)
- In Our Prime (2022)
- In My End Is My Beginning (2013)
- Failan (2001)
- Old Days (2016)
- Kuro Arirang (1989)
- Heaven: To the Land of Happiness (2021)
- Our Twisted Hero (1992)
- Springtime (2004)
- No. 3 (1997)
TV (6)
Where to start with Choi Min-sik
Oldboy first, and not only because it is the famous one: it is the performance every award in his cabinet is attached to, and the physical commitment in it explains the rest of the filmography. Follow it with I Saw the Devil, where he plays the man being pursued and gives the film its awful comic timing, and Lady Vengeance, where he is in support and plays it cold.
If crime procedure is what you want, Nameless Gangster is the richer of the two mob films and New World is the slicker one. The Admiral: Roaring Currents is the national epic, enormous and stately, worth seeing for the scale even though the register is unlike anything else here. Failan is the quiet one people miss. Skip Lucy unless you want to see how little Hollywood knew what to do with him.