Lee Seung-gi

Lee Seung-gi sings, acts and hosts, and for most of his career he has done all three at once, which is why Korean entertainment coverage keeps reaching for the phrase triple threat. He holds a Golden Disc Award for the music and a Baeksang Arts Award for the acting, and Forbes Korea has placed him on its Power Celebrity 40 list repeatedly since 2010, as high as sixth in 2022.

The variety work is the spine of it. 2 Days and 1 Night made him a household presence long before any drama did, and the same instinct carried through Master In The House, New Journey to the West, Busted! and hosting duties on Produce 48 and Sing Again. Very few actors of his standing keep that up, because variety is normally the thing you graduate away from once the dramas start paying.

The dramas track a steady widening. He began in fantasy-tinged romance with My Girlfriend Is a Gumiho and Gu Family Book, moved through royal melodrama in The King 2 Hearts and comic adventure in A Korean Odyssey, then went somewhere considerably harder. Vagabond is a large-scale action thriller and Mouse is bleak crime television that asks him to play against everything the variety persona had spent years building. That gamble is the most interesting thing in the filmography, more so than safe returns like The Law Cafe.