Song Kang-ho

Song Kang-ho came up in Korean cinema in the mid-1990s in small parts, The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well, Green Fish, No. 3, and by the end of the decade was carrying films outright: The Quiet Family, Shiri, The Foul King, Joint Security Area. Everything after that is a matter of which director got to him next.

What makes him unusual is that he is not built like a leading man and does not behave like one. He plays ordinary, slightly shabby men who are convinced they have the situation handled, and the performance lives in the gap between that confidence and the evidence. Detective Park in Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder is the idea at full stretch, a policeman who believes he can read guilt off a face. Kim Ki-taek in Parasite, sixteen years later, is recognisably the same man with a better suit and a worse plan. He has done four films with Bong and four with Park Chan-wook, and one of the Park titles, Lady Vengeance, credits him as Assassin 1, a single-scene appearance taken in the middle of a run of leads. That tells you something about how he thinks about the job.

He holds a Cannes best actor prize, three Baeksang Arts Awards, four Blue Dragon Film Awards and five Grand Bell Awards, and in 2020 the New York Times named him one of the greatest actors of the twenty-first century. He is still working constantly, in Broker, Emergency Declaration, Cobweb, and on television in Uncle Samsik.