When it comes to acting, CHOI swings from one extreme to the other. His characters have an outpouring of emotions such as a North Korean spy in <Swiri> who enraged about the deplorable state of North Korea to Oh Dae-su in <Old Boy> who seethed for revenge and Kyung-chul in <I Saw The Devil> who was evil to the core. He used to play an ordinary Korean in various TV dramas during the 1990s. After a long hiatus, he made a welcoming movie comeback with <No. 3...More

When it comes to acting, CHOI swings from one extreme to the other. His characters have an outpouring of emotions such as a North Korean spy in <Swiri> who enraged about the deplorable state of North Korea to Oh Dae-su in <Old Boy> who seethed for revenge and Kyung-chul in <I Saw The Devil> who was evil to the core. He used to play an ordinary Korean in various TV dramas during the 1990s. After a long hiatus, he made a welcoming movie comeback with <No. 3> in the late 1990s, starring as a hardheaded prosecutor with an intriguing entourage of sidekicks. He has emerged as one of Korea’s best actors with his roles in <Swiri> and <Old Boy>. His acting dominates the silver screen but his characters have more than charisma. In <Happy End>, he played a timid husband who holed up in a used bookstore reading romance novels, while his wife cheated on him. In <Failan>, he played a thug who was married to a Chinese woman out of convenience but shed tears over the death of his fake wife who yearned for his love. His movies have been favorites at Cannes. The Cannes Film Festival awarded the Best Director Prize to <Chihwaseon> where he played a renowned Korean painter; JANG Seung-Ub and granted the Grand Prix of the Jury to a bloody revenge epic <Old Boy>. CHOI next appeared in the drama <Springtime> (2004), RYOO Seung-wan’s boxing film <Crying Fist> (2004) and <Sympathy for Lady Vengeance> (2005), the last instalment of PARK Chan-wook’s revenge trilogy. But following that, he went on hiatus from the industry, largely due to his opposition to the film screening quota slash by the government at the behest of the United States government. He returned in the small indie film <Himalaya, Where The Wind Dwells> by JEON Soo-il in 2009 but was back with a heavy hitter the next year, starring as a crazed psychopath in KIM Jee-woon’s <I Saw the Devil>. A pair of well-received gangster films followed in 2012 and 2013, YOON Jong-bin’s <Nameless Gangster: The Rules of the Times> and PARK Hong-joon’s <New World>. His biggest ever role came the next year, when he incarnated Admiral LEE Sun-shin in <Roaring Currents>, which became the biggest film of all time in Korea and earned the performer a chest of awards. The same year he was seen as the antagonist in the hit Luc Besson thriller <Lucy>. Re-teaming with PARK Hong-joon, CHOI next played the hunter of the last tiger on the Korean peninsula in <The Tiger> in 2015. Though not a success at the height of his prior films, the film once again earned him strong notices for his commanding lead role. CHOI next signed on to play the Mayor of Seoul in PARK In-jae’s <Special Citizen>.Less