Park Bo-gum
Park Bo-gum is an actor, born 1993.
He was in the corner of other people's films first. Small, clean, unshowy work through the early 2010s: Blind, The Admiral: Roaring Currents, Coin Locker Girl, and a young officer in A Hard Day while Korean cinema was booming around him.
Reply 1988 changed the scale. As Choi Taek, the quiet one, he had to hold a large ensemble show with stillness instead of dialogue, and the country decided it liked him. Love in the Moonlight made the stardom official. He is the youngest actor Gallup Korea has named Television Actor of the Year twice, and the first actor to top the Forbes Korea Power Celebrity list, which are the kinds of statistics that follow a face rather than a performance.
What he actually does well is a sort of transparency: Park plays men whose feelings arrive on the face slightly before they arrive in the script. That is why he lands melodrama so cleanly in Encounter and Record of Youth, and why he is a little at sea in films that want him hard. Seobok and Wonderland both use his blankness as science-fiction texture, with mixed results. The 2025 pair of When Life Gives You Tangerines and Good Boy found an adult register the earlier hits never asked him for.
Movies (9)
TV (21)
- 2 Days and 1 Night (2007)
- When Life Gives You Tangerines (2025)
- Reply 1988 (2015)
- The Seasons (2023)
- Baeksang Arts Awards (2012)
- Good Boy (2025)
- Itaewon Class (2020)
- Record of Youth (2020)
- Love in the Moonlight (2016)
- KBS Drama Awards (1987)
- Encounter (2018)
- Mnet Asian Music Awards (2009)
- Youth Over Flowers (2014)
- Bridal Mask (2012)
- Hyori's Bed and Breakfast (2017)
- I Remember You (2015)
- KBS Song Festival (2006)
- Young Actors' Retreat (2022)
- My Name Is Gabriel (2024)
- Hero (2012)
- Naeil's Cantabile (2014)
Where to start with Park Bo-gum
Reply 1988 first, always. Choi Taek explains the rest of the career: he is given very little to say and the show keeps cutting to him anyway, because Park can carry a scene on a held expression.
After that, Love in the Moonlight is the pure star vehicle, a sunny palace romance built to be adored, and Record of Youth is the grown-up version of the same appeal, an actor playing an actor trying to get cast. For melancholy, Encounter is the one, slow and quite indulgent and lovely if you are in the mood. The film side is patchier: Seobok is the interesting failure, and A Hard Day is the tight thriller where you can spot him before anyone knew the name. End on When Life Gives You Tangerines, which asks more of him than anything before it.