Hwang Bo-ra

A ramyeon commercial did more for Hwang Bo-ra than her early films did. She became nationally recognisable as the quirky-looking "cup noodle girl" in an advert, which is an unglamorous route to fame and turned out to be a useful one: it fixed her in the public mind as a specific comic face rather than another interchangeable young actress.

The film work proved she could do the other thing. In 2007 she played the daughter and narrator in the black comedy Skeletons in the Closet and took Best New Actress at both the Busan Film Critics Awards and the Director's Cut Awards for it. What she built afterwards is one of the most reliable second-lead careers in Korean television, which in the romantic comedy format is a demanding and badly underrated job: the friend who says the thing the lead cannot, absorbs the comic pressure, and quite often gets the better subplot.

Run the list and the consistency is the story. Bong Se-ra in What's Wrong with Secretary Kim, Park Chan Sook in Fight for My Way, Chun Hyang in Mystic Pop-up Bar, Gong Hwa-sook in Vagabond, Sim Yoo-mi in Hyena, Lee Mi-ok in Crash Course in Romance. She is rarely the lead and almost never wasted, and the career remains fundamentally a television one.