Lee Kwang-soo

Modelling first, then sitcoms, then something else entirely. Lee Kwang-soo got to acting through Here He Comes in 2008 and became famous across Asia for Running Man, which he joined in 2010 and where the joke was usually at his expense. That persona was effective enough to threaten to become the whole career.

The acting record is more interesting than the persona suggests, and it splits cleanly. On one side, the comic support he was hired for constantly, in All About My Wife, The Pirates: The Last Royal Treasure and Sinkhole. On the other, a deliberate campaign to be taken seriously, beginning with It's Okay, That's Love in 2014 and running through the black comedy Collective Invention in 2015 and Inseparable Bros in 2019, all of which asked him to hold a scene with no joke in it. The neo-noir Confession, from the same year as the first of those, is not among the credits listed here.

The recent work has gone further in that direction. Live in 2018 was the turn where the comedy became incidental, and No Way Out: The Roulette, The Manipulated and Karma, all inside two years, are thrillers in which he is not funny at all. It is rare for a variety-show fixture to be let out into drama, and rarer for it to work.