Yim Si-wan

In Squid Game (2024), Yim Si-wan’s Lee Myung-gi is an antagonist with enough humanity left to complicate our response. We rate that quality in his acting: understanding what drives a troubling character need not mean liking him. His appearances in the second and third series (2024–2025) continue his move towards morally ambiguous roles. He had already proved persuasive as an ordinary young man struggling in harsh circumstances, so these darker parts draw on an established strength.

The Attorney (2013), alongside Song Kang-ho, and the workplace drama Misaeng: Incomplete Life (2014) were the breakthroughs. The latter’s Jang Geu-rae gave him a lead role built around the difficulties of an ordinary young man, which remains a useful starting point for his work. The Merciless (2017) took him into darker territory as undercover policeman Jo Hyun-soo. That turn did not rule out the romantic lead in Run On (2020), before a supporting villain role in Emergency Declaration (2022).

Before Yim joined, Hwang Dong-hyuk’s Squid Game made good use of the connection between desperation and bad behaviour. In those earlier episodes, we were shaken by the children’s games because the players’ desperation made the cruelty hard to dismiss as spectacle. The speeches could be blunt, and the series was less convincing when it told us what to think. Myung-gi gives Yim the more delicate task of keeping a villain human, in a drama that had already made its competition frightening through the players’ recognisable feelings.

His account of working with Hwang is instructive: the director asked him to explore Myung-gi’s humanity, then found that leaning into it was not quite right either. That requires more care than simply making a clean-cut performer look unpleasant. We would be wary of parts that rely on that contrast alone. We would begin with Misaeng: Incomplete Life, where he makes Jang Geu-rae’s difficulties at work worth our attention.