Jo Hee-bong

Jo Hee-bong is the sort of actor whose face arrives before his name does. He started in 1997 with the theatre troupe Bipa and moved into film and television as a supporting player, which is where he has stayed for nearly thirty years and something like sixty credits: detectives, eunuchs, middle managers, fathers, the man behind the desk who gets one scene and has to make it count.

The skill is specificity inside a small allocation. Given a detective in the thriller Blind or in Montage, he plays the tiredness of the job rather than the drama of the case. Given a comic part in a period drama, as with Eunuch Seong in Love in the Moonlight, he plays the fussiness completely straight and lets the scene be funny around him. That flexibility is why the same actor turns up in the sombre court intrigue of Tree with Deep Roots and Six Flying Dragons, in the slapstick of My Wife is a Gangster 3, and in the procedural warmth of Good Doctor without any of it looking like a stretch.

He has also had the good luck to be in things people actually watched: My Love from the Star, The Pirates, Chuno, Tunnel, The Red Sleeve. Korean television runs on actors like this, and there is a decent argument that a supporting bench this deep is the reason its dramas hold together at all.