Song Kang-ho

Song Kang-ho Biography & Career Overview

Song Kang-ho is a Cannes Best Actor Award-winning South Korean actor celebrated as one of the greatest, most versatile, and influential acting geniuses in world cinematic history. Rising through social theater and experimental troupe acting without formal screen training, Song made his breakthrough in Hong Sang-soo's The Day a Pig Fell into the Well (1996) and Lee Chang-dong's Green Fish (1997), before achieving massive national stardom as a North Korean soldier in Park Chan-wook's historic blockbuster Joint Security Area (2000). Song established legendary creative partnerships with Korea's greatest auteur directors: starring in Park Chan-wook's vengeance classic Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) and Thirst (2009 as a vampire priest), and Kim Jee-woon's The Foul King (2000) and The Age of Shadows (2016). Song formed an immortal, four-film artistic brotherhood with director Bong Joon-ho, anchoring the landmark procedural Memories of Murder (2003 as bumbling detective Park Doo-man), the monster blockbuster The Host (2006), the post-apocalyptic sci-fi Snowpiercer (2013 opposite Chris Evans), and the historic masterpiece Parasite (2019 as patriarch Kim Ki-taek), which made world history as the first non-English-language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture and won the SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast. In 2022, Song made history as the first South Korean male actor to win Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival for Hirokazu Kore-eda's Broker. Named by The New York Times as one of the 25 Greatest Actors of the 21st Century, Song Kang-ho is an international acting titan.