Lee Sun-kyun
Sleek South Korean star of the Oscar-winning satire Parasite
LEE SUN-KYUN, the South Korean actor who has died aged 48, became an international star after playing the aloof tech entrepreneur Park Dong-ik in the 2019 thriller Parasite,
the first film in a language other than English to win best picture at the Academy Awards.
In Bong Joon-ho’s gripping social satire, the Kims, a sly but luckless working-class clan, hit paydirt when their 20-something son, Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik), lands a job tutoring Park’s teenage daughter. So begins a complex domestic heist in which the Kims conspire to fleece the Parks for all they are worth.
Park is duped into hiring the Kim family father, Kitaek (Song Kang-ho), as his chauffeur. On the surface their relationship is cordial. But Park, thinking he cannot be overheard, describes Kim to his wife as though he is subhuman, denouncing the man’s smell as “like an old radish … No. You know when you boil a rag? It smells like that.”
As the families entwine, the flicker of class envy ignites a coal-seam fire of resentment that could explode at any moment. “Once the Kims’ plan comes together, it collapses in style, yet Parasite’s grip on its point is so tight, you could swear you can feel it tightening around your own neck,” wrote the Telegraph’s
Robbie Collin.
Parasite became the first Korean film to win the Palme d’or, at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. The next year it was the first Korean film to win any Academy Award, picking up four Oscars: best director, best original screenplay, best international feature film and best picture.
The film grossed more than $100 million, and not only raised the profile of Korean cinema but also led to several lucrative offers for the sleek and handsome Lee, who won the Screen Actors Guild Award for his role. Yet, by his own account, his English was not good enough to make the leap beyond the Korean screen. “I probably should have worked harder on learning the language,” he said.
Lee Sun-kyun was born in Seoul on March 2 1975 and studied theatre at the Korea National University of Arts, making his stage debut in a production of The Rocky Horror Show in 2001. Two years later he appeared in
Grease.
His first film role was as the doctor in Scent of Love (2003), about a Korean woman who becomes pregnant only to discover that she has stomach cancer and must choose between her own life and that of her unborn child.
Until Parasite, Lee was best known in the West for Nobody’s Daughter (2013), featuring a cameo by Jane Birkin. He played a married movie director and film studies professor who resumes an on-off affair with a depressed student (Jung Eun-chae). He also appeared in the acclaimed Korean television series My Mister (2018) as a structural engineer who is bullied by his colleagues and develops a relationship with an impoverished young woman.
His next major role was in the 2021 Apple TV+ show Dr Brain as a brain scientist searching for the missing son he thought he had buried, but who may still be alive. In so doing he taps into the brain waves of recently dead humans and, in one instance, a dead cat that might have witnessed a kidnapping.
One of Lee’s last roles involved wearing hair extensions, smoky eyeliner and a moustache to play Jonathan, a self-obsessed business executive who manipulates and abuses his actress wife in Killing Romance (2023). “Jonathan is a narcissist and lacks empathy. He’s like a cartoon character,” Lee told The Korea Times. “It was like presenting a masque.”
Lee, who told CNN that he was an admirer of the entrepreneur Elon Musk, was an investor in Tesla.
At the time of his death, apparently by suicide, he was being investigated by the South Korean authorities over suspected drug use. He is survived by his wife, the actress Jeon Hye-jin, and by their two sons.