Won Bin does almost nothing until the moment he does everything. A television heartthrob who was for years sent only soft parts, he found two directors who looked past the face, made two films that used his stillness, and then stopped.
Fi1m perspective
In The Man from Nowhere (2010), Cha Tae-sik stands at a bathroom mirror and cuts off his own fringe with a pair of scissors. He has barely spoken for the first hour of Lee Jeong-beom's film, barely moved, and has let Kim Sae-ron do the talking from the other side of the pawnshop counter. When the hair comes off, Won Bin changes the way he stands, and the film changes with him. That is his method in one scene: he gives you nothing for as long as the story will allow, and then he gives you the shift.
He did not arrive this way. A cable-television audition in 1995, while he was still at school, led to television parts through the late 1990s and then Autumn in My Heart (2000), the drama that made him a star across the region and fixed the image he spent the next decade trying to shed: the soft, wounded, beautiful boy. The films that followed, Guns & Talks (2001) for Jang Jin and Taegukgi (2004) opposite Jang Dong-gun, were bigger but not much different, and the early notices treated him as a face that could act rather than an actor. He went into military service in 2005 and by his own account came out to find the scripts had not moved: "I wanted a different feeling, but I kept getting screenplays that were a repetition of my existing image for soft and tenderhearted characters."
Bong Joon-ho's Mother (2009) was the way out. Won Bin took a supporting part as Yoon Do-joon, the developmentally disabled son to Kim Hye-ja's mother, and played it with restraint, which was the point. Then Lee Jeong-beom gave him a lead built on the same restraint, he trained hard for the fights, and the two films together did what a decade of romantic leads had not.
What he does is in the eyes and in the pauses. Tae-sik's grief in the pawnshop, while So-mi paints her nails and lies about where her mother is, is played without a word, and it moved us more than any of the violence that follows, because the violence is the genre doing its job and the waiting is him. The caveat is the one we gave the film: Kim Sae-ron, a child, is better than he is, and the part is written so that she can be. His stillness is a frame for other people's performances as much as a performance of its own, and the last fight, which we still think is worth the evening by itself, is where the frame finally fills.
He has not acted on screen since. The image from that final role is strong enough that it may have become the problem the flower boy once was. If he comes back, we hope it is for a director who understands that the first hour, the one where nothing happens, is the part he is good at.
Biography
Won Bin, born Kim Do-jin, is a South Korean actor. He gained wide popularity in 2000 after starring in the television series Autumn in My Heart.
He has appeared in a small number of films, including Guns & Talks (2001), Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War (2004), My Brother (2004), Mother (2009) as Yoon Do-joon, and The Man from Nowhere (2010) as Cha Tae-sik. He trained at the Paekche Institute of the Arts and Yong In University.
