Kim Young-kwang

The runway came first. Kim Young-kwang modelled for Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood and Etro, and in 2008 he became the first Asian model to walk Dior Homme's show. Korean television has absorbed a lot of models over the years and most of them stay decorative. He did not, though it took a while.

For most of the 2010s he was the second lead, and specifically the well-dressed, wealthy, faintly sad second lead. Seo Beom-jo in Pinocchio is the template: a young man with money, no leverage, and feelings pointed at somebody whose attention is elsewhere. He is very good at that particular unhappiness, and there is a reason directors kept buying it.

The break out of the pattern came through film and comedy. On Your Wedding Day gave him a first-love story to carry alone, Hot Young Bloods put him in period slapstick, and The Secret Life of My Secretary let him play the sort of preposterous romantic-comedy lead who has to be funny about his own vanity. More recently the work has gone colder, into thriller territory with Somebody and Trigger, which is a sensible use of an actor whose height and stillness read as menace the moment he stops smiling.