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Go Kyung-pyo

Go Kyung-pyo is an actor, born 1990.

Sketch comedy is an unusual foundation for a dramatic career, but it is where Ko Kyung-pyo built his. He began working in 2010 and spent the first three seasons of Saturday Night Live Korea, across 2011 and 2012, as a cast member, a training regime that teaches timing and shamelessness in roughly equal measure.

Recognition arrived through television. Sung Sun-woo in Reply 1988 made him a familiar face, and the run through the 2016 romantic comedy listed here as Jealousy Incarnate and elsewhere as Don't Dare to Dream, then Chicago Typewriter in 2017, established what he does best: a warm, slightly hapless surface with something colder beneath it that he can flip to inside a single line. Leading roles followed in Strongest Deliveryman, Cross, Love in Contract and Frankly Speaking.

Film is where he has been taken most seriously. His performance in Park Chan-wook's Decision to Leave brought a Best Supporting Actor nomination and a Popular Star Award at the Blue Dragon Film Awards. Around it sits an unusually wide spread of genre: the naval epic The Admiral: Roaring Currents, the crime drama Coin Locker Girl, the period thriller The Treacherous, the heist comedy 6/45, and the conscription series D.P.

Movies (14)

TV (25)

Where to start with Go Kyung-pyo

The best film he has been in is not the one where he has the most to do. Start with Decision to Leave anyway: Park Chan-wook's film is the finest thing on this list, and his junior detective is the small part that anchors its entire procedural half. Then Reply 1988, which is the opposite experience, a long and generous nostalgia drama where he is one of five kids on a Seoul street, and where you can watch him earn a country's affection in real time.

For the comic register, Jealousy Incarnate and Love in Contract are the sturdiest romantic comedies here. D.P. is the tonal outlier, a bleak look at military conscription with none of his usual charm in it. 6/45 is the throwaway, an inter-Korean lottery farce funnier than it has any right to be, and Coin Locker Girl is the nastiest thing on the list.

Genres Go Kyung-pyo works in