Park Hee-soon

Park Hee-soon did eleven years on stage before the camera got him. He took a theatre degree at the Seoul Institute of the Arts and belonged to the Mokwha Repertory Company from 1990 to 2001, and only became active in film from 2002. That order of events shows: he is a stage actor's kind of screen presence, holding still and letting the camera come to him.

The breakthrough was Seven Days in 2007, where his portrayal of a tough cop won him several Best Supporting Actor prizes. Further recognition followed for The Scam and for 1987: When the Day Comes, in which he plays Detective Jo Han-kyung. His speciality is institutional men, the ones who carry a badge, a rank or a title and most of the film's moral weight: Kim Jang-ok in The Age of Shadows, Lee Si-baek in The Fortress, King Jung-jong in Monstrum, Lee Dae-bum in V.I.P., the Commanding Officer in Squid Game.

International attention came late and came from television. My Name in 2021 put him in front of a global streaming audience, Squid Game widened it further, and Moving put him inside one of the biggest Korean genre ensembles of recent years. The current run is busy and varied: A Model Family, Trolley, The Bequeathed, Dr. Brain, and the 2025 feature No Other Choice. He is at the stage of a career where he no longer has to raise his voice to dominate a scene, and the parts have started to be written that way.