Actor You Need to Know: Park Gyu-young

Seo Ah-ri (Park Gyu-young), to make it in social media’s cutthroat race for fame and fortune, takes chances, unequivocally, boosting her profile and following. Along the way, she grabs the spotlight while also running into its darker realms. This is a riveting tale—Celebrity (2023)—relevant given how we engage in social media and its massive impact on our daily lives, with plenty to grasp if you can see past the obvious: the deeper connotations—one being to choose words carefully—for their profundity can be alarming. And at the heart of it all lies Park’s subtle portrayal. Here we see common trends in an intriguing context: envy, an itch for control, and toxic human attitudes—played to perfection by the actors, notably Park’s facile expressiveness.

I’ve just completed watching the drama and felt it particularly pertinent to browse through her work. Her career hasn’t been so drawn-out to date, yet her scene-stealing performance in Celebrity underlines the acting acumen she owns. Park, in my mind, is an indisputably promising Korean actor, pushing herself to take on bigger challenges with each new project. Technically debuting in a 2016 music video, she took on supporting roles in a string of dramas before cracking the first shot on the big screen with the movies Wretches and Love+Sling in 2018. As I scroll across her filmography now, it’s clear: she has never been confined to just a few genres or chances, so the sky is her limit, and she is steadily spreading her wings.

A few more television drama stints in the following years up until 2020, when she got Nam Ju-ri in the megahit healing romantic-comedy drama It’s Okay to Not Be Okay, starring Kim Soo-hyun and Seo Yea-ji. Nam Ju-ri is a nurse working with her crush, Moon Gang-tae (Kim), at OK Psychiatric Hospital; her feelings for him are deep but to no avail. Park excels in the role—introverted and naturally envious of others coming close to her love interest. She caught my eye for the first time in this drama. A natural in Ju-ri’s skin, she acts so vividly, revealing the thoughts racing through Ju-ri’s mind. In the subsequent big-hit horror apocalypse Sweet Home, Park costarred with Song Kang and fellow actors as Yoon Ji-soo, the bass player who moves to ‘Green Home’ when her lover commits suicide.

Her next venture, The Devil Judge (2021), a critically acclaimed mystery legal dystopian drama, unfolds in an unstable period when the titular judge, Kang Yo-han (Ji Sung), turns the court into a reality show-like medium and executes offenders with utter severity. Yoon Soo-hyun, a lieutenant in the Regional Investigation Unit, is a key figure here, played by Park. She shows a profound capacity for emotional shifts in the story, something I want to commend her for. Soo-hyun is as gutsy in seeking to expose the inner workings of Yo-han as she is fragile in her feelings for Kim Ga-on (Park Jinyoung), Yo-han’s subordinate judge. This romantic bond makes the otherwise bleak premise a little easier to deal with.

Park took on Kim Dali, a scholar who crosses paths with an upstart Jin Moo-hak (Kim Min-jae) in the Netherlands, in the rom-com Dali & Cocky Prince (2021), marking her debut lead role in a TV drama. Dali goes home after her father passes away to take charge of her family’s faltering art museum. They unexpectedly meet again when Moo-hak, an essential creditor of property, turns in to retrieve the money he owes. Over time, an unexpected romance blossoms between them. As an attractive Dali versed in a variety of subjects, Park shone in her performance just as much as she did in highlighting her flaws, like her lack of domestic skills.

Park, I’d wind up, smoothly switches from minimal to massive and can be an artist of contrasts. She has clearly been in the driver’s seat of how she operates since her inception. I’m very curious to see how she comes about in the much-anticipated Squid Game Season 2.