Park Hee-soon

Park Hee-soon is a South Korean actor born on February 13, 1970. He built much of his early reputation in theater before becoming widely recognized for film and television performances. His screen work is notable for characters who are morally ambiguous, intimidating, restrained, or unexpectedly vulnerable, and he has appeared in major commercial films as well as darker crime dramas. One of Park’s prominent film roles came in the 2009 crime comedy The Scam, directed by Lee Ho-jae. He played Hwang Jong-gu, a skilled con artist operating among stock-market manipulators. In 2010, he appeared in Kang Woo-suk’s mystery thriller Moss, adapted from Yoon Tae-ho’s webtoon. Park portrayed Ryu Mok-hyung, the influential and unsettling village leader whose death brings an outsider, played by Jeong Jae-young, into a remote community full of concealed conflicts. Park continued to work frequently in thrillers and action films. In The Client (2011), he played prosecutor Kang Seong-hee opposite Ha Jung-woo and Jang Hyuk in a murder-case courtroom drama. He was also part of the cast of The Suspect (2013), starring Gong Yoo as a North Korean defector pursued across South Korea. Park played Min Se-hoon, an intelligence official connected to the film’s conspiracy. His later film credits include 1987: When the Day Comes (2017), a historical drama based on events surrounding the death of student activist Park Jong-chul and the June Democratic Struggle. He appeared in Woo Min-ho’s The Drug King (2018), set amid the drug trade and political corruption of 1970s Busan, and in the 2019 action film The Divine Move: Ghost Move. International streaming audiences became especially familiar with Park through Netflix’s 2021 series My Name. He played Choi Mu-jin, the leader of the Dongcheon crime organization. In the series, Choi takes in Yoon Ji-woo, played by Han So-hee, after her father is murdered and trains her to infiltrate the police. The role placed Park at the center of a story involving revenge, gang rivalry, undercover policing, and shifting loyalties. Park later appeared in Netflix’s 2022 crime drama A Model Family, in which he played Gwang-cheol, a dangerous drug-cartel figure. He also starred in the SBS drama Trolley as Nam Joong-do, a National Assembly member whose carefully maintained public life is destabilized when his wife’s past becomes known. In 2024, he appeared in Netflix’s supernatural mystery series The Bequeathed, directed by Yeon Sang-ho and Min Hong-nam, playing Choi Seong-jun, a police officer investigating deaths connected to an inheritance and a family secret. Park Hee-soon married actress Park Ye-jin in 2015.