Kim Jung-young

Read the credit list before the biography and you learn something about how Korean television works. Kim Jung-young, born in 1972, has forty credits here, and a striking number of the characters are billed not by name but by relation: Girl's Mother, Cheol-soo's Mother, Sung-hoon's mother, Ho-rang's mother, Kim Won-kyeong's Aunt, Tae Hee's aunt. That is the supporting-actress economy in miniature, and she has worked inside it for a quarter of a century without ever being only that.

She began in film in the early 2000s, and those credits are serious ones: Bungee Jumping of Their Own, Waikiki Brothers, Bad Guy, and Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, which is about as far from broadcast melodrama as Korean cinema gets. Television recognition came much later, through Clean with Passion for Now in 2018 and Black Dog in 2019, and then a run of high-visibility series where she is one of the reasons a scene works: Business Proposal, The King: Eternal Monarch, The Glory.

What she does is unshowy and hard to fake. She plays ordinary Korean women with a precise social position and a very short fuse under a polite surface, and she can turn a scene from comedy to something colder in a single line without changing volume. The best of the recent work gives her a name instead of a relation: Kim Geum Ja, Park Sang-im, Yoon Hong-joo. Those are the ones to look for.