Jang Seung-jo

It took Jang Seung-jo the better part of a decade to become a name. Born in 1981 and working under a stage name, since he was born Jang Hyun-deok, he spent his early career in the supporting ranks of Korean television: procedurals like God's Quiz and Liar Game, the historical drama Hwajung, the kind of credits that keep an actor employed without making him famous.

Money Flower changed that in 2017, and 2018 delivered everything at once, with Familiar Wife and Encounter inside the same twelve months. Both are romances, and both established the register he has worked in ever since: composed men who hold their footing while the plot loses its own. Lee Kang-moo in Snowdrop, Oh Ji-hyeok in The Good Detective and Lee Jun in Chocolate are all variations on it, played with a restraint that reads as authority in some scenes and as concealment in others, which is a genuinely useful thing to be able to do in melodrama.

The recent work is darker and more central. Death's Game and The Frog are thrillers rather than melodramas, As You Stood By and Nothing Uncovered belong to the same turn, and My Royal Nemesis puts him back in costume in a dual role as Choi Mun-do and King An-jeong. A second-lead reputation is a hard thing to shed in Korean television, and this run is what shedding it looks like.