Steve Park

Steve Park was born in Brooklyn in 1962 to Korean immigrant parents and started in stand-up comedy before acting. He was a cast member on In Living Color for the 1991 to 1992 season, and by then he had already played Sonny in Do the Right Thing and was about to play Detective Brian in Falling Down.

The first two decades of his filmography are, in the most literal sense, on the page. The credits read: Asian Cop Number One. Kim, Grocery Cashier. Captain Moon. Researcher. Assistant to Salazar. That was the work available, and he did it. He also voiced Mike Sorayama on The Venture Bros. and played a judge in Rocket Science.

What changed is that a specific set of directors began writing him whole people. He has been in two Coen brothers films, and the Mike Yanagita scene in Fargo is one of the strangest and best things in it: a man engineering a lunch under entirely false pretences, played with a mixture of loneliness and social panic that the film never comments on. Wes Anderson has used him three times, most memorably as Lieutenant Nescaffier in The French Dispatch, where one late monologue lets him quietly walk off with the picture. Bong Joon-ho has cast him twice, in Snowpiercer and Mickey 17.

It reads as two careers, and the second one, which began around the age most actors are winding down, is the good one.