Bong Joon-Ho’s film Parasite is on everybody’s lips after it became the first Korean film to win the Palme d’Or, and the first film to do so with a unanimous vote since 2013’s Blue Is the Warmest Colour. Recently, it won Best Foreign Language Film at the 77th Golden Globe Awards. And it is South Korea’s entry for Best International Feature Film at the 92nd Academy Awards.
Parasite is a black comedy thriller. The film stars Song Kang Ho, Lee Sun Kyun, Cho Yeo Jeong, Choi Wooshik and Park So Dam, and follows the members of a poor household scheming to become employees of a much wealthier family by posing as unrelated, highly qualified individuals.
We decided to look at the cast and see what other dramas we can recommend to the #BongHive.
Song Kang Ho doesn’t have Dramas in his resume. But If you want to sample more of his acting, we recommend picking up A Taxi Driver.
He plays a widowed taxi driver who lives with his eleven year old daughter in a small house. He is an ordinary man from the working class who cares only about his family’s livelihood and is uninterested in political issues. The character is loosely based on real-life taxi driver Kim Sa-bok, who ferried Jurgen Hinzpeter to Gwangju. Kim remained out of the public eye until the release of A Taxi Driver, when in September 2017, following the immense commercial and critical success of the film in South Korea, Kim’s identity was finally confirmed by his son, Kim Seung-pil. The younger Kim shared with the media a photo of Jurgen Hinzpeter with his father and revealed that his father died of cancer in 1984, four years after the Gwangju events.
Lee Sun Kyun’s acting resume spans theater, film, and television. There’s a lot of good stuff in there, but we recommend the more recent My Mister.
My Mister tells the story of three middle-aged brothers, who are enduring the weight of their lives, and a strong, cold woman, who has been living a hard life of her own, as they come together in healing each other’s past scars. Lee Sun Kyun portrays the second oldest of the three brothers. He works as an engineer at an architectural firm and always has a safety-first approach to life. He is quiet and stoic, but also goes all in for the people he loves.
Cho Yeo-jeong began as a CeCi Magazine cover girl at the age of 16 in 1997. Her big break came in 2010 with in the erotic period drama The Servant. She has since then increased her filmography. We want to recommend the high rating and on going drama Woman of 9.9 Billion, a story of an unfortunate woman named Jeong Seo-yeon (Cho Yeo Jeong) who finds herself with 9.9 billion won.
Choi Woo shik
Choi Woo-shik is a Korean-Canadian actor. His family moved to Canada when he was young, then he decided to move back to South Korea to pursue an acting career. We recommend watching him on Train to Busan, Netflix’s Okja, or The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion.
Wooshik plays the ‘Nobleman’ who roams around a girl named Ja-yoon. 10 years ago, she escaped from a government facility in the midst of an inexplicable incident by herself and lost all her memory. An old couple takes her in even though she doesn’t know her name or age. She grows up to be a bright high school student and enters a nationally televised audition program to win the top prize and help her struggling family out. As soon as she appears on TV, strange people start appearing in her life – one of them is Wooshik.
Park Sodam saw the musical Grease in high school and became interested in acting. Her career started in the independent films circle gaining her attention for her acting chops. Her break in mainstream came with The Silenced where she won Best Supporting Actress from the Busan Film Critics Awards.
She only has 4 dramas under her belt, but she’s coming back to the small screen with Youth Records with Park Bogum.
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