Lee Byung-hun

Lee Byung-hun built a career in South Korea twice. The first version was television stardom, the run of series through All In in 2003 that made him a face every household knew. The second was harder and better: a decade of films that used his blankness as a weapon, starting with Joint Security Area in 2000, where he plays a border guard inside an investigation that keeps rearranging what the audience thinks it has seen.

His gift is stillness with something loaded behind it. A Bittersweet Life is the clearest case, a hotel manager whose politeness holds for exactly as long as the film needs it to. In I Saw the Devil he takes the opposite position, a man who has already decided what he is willing to become. Masquerade asks him to play a king and the commoner impersonating him, and the two performances are distinguishable by posture alone.

Hollywood has been less imaginative. Storm Shadow in the G.I. Joe films, the T-1000 in Terminator Genisys, the knife thrower in The Magnificent Seven: sleek, silent, hired for a profile. Squid Game finally handed a global audience the actor the Korean industry had all along, and No Other Choice, which brought him a Golden Globe nomination, is the current evidence that he has not settled into being anyone's icon.