Yu Jun-sang

Hong Sang-soo's regulars and prime-time drama audiences rarely overlap. Yoo Jun-sang, born in Seoul in 1969, belongs to both, and has for fifteen years. The art-house half knows him from Ha Ha Ha (2010), The Day He Arrives (2011) and In Another Country (2012), the films his write-ups always name, and the collaboration kept running through Right Now, Wrong Then (2015), Yourself and Yours (2016) and Hotel by the River (2019).

That work asks for something most actors find hard: he plays men who are talking themselves into being better than they are, at length, in long unbroken takes, and he has to make the self-deception funny without ever letting the character in on the joke. It is the register he owns. Even a tiny role, the lifeguard in In Another Country, gets the same treatment.

The other half of the career is broad and popular. My Husband Got a Family made him a household name in 2012, and the television roles since have been substantial: Ga Mo-tak across two seasons of The Uncanny Counter, Park Jin in Alchemy of Souls, Jung Doo-man in The Penthouse. In film he has done solid character work in Moss (2010), Wide Awake (2007), Soar Into the Sun and The Target. And he sings: alongside all of it he has kept a musical-theatre career going in productions including The Three Musketeers, Jack the Ripper and The Days, which is where the projection in his screen acting comes from.