Korea's late-blooming leading man is making his Hollywood debut with "Bedford Park" — and his backstory is wilder than you'd expect
Son Suk-ku is officially a Sundance darling.
Last month, "Bedford Park" — a New Jersey-set romantic drama in which he stars opposite Moon Choi — won a jury award for first-time filmmakers at the festival.
Sony Pictures Classics promptly scooped up the film's worldwide distribution rights, which means the 42-year-old will soon have his first proper theatrical run in the States.
It's a milestone for an actor who's spent the last few years becoming one of Korea's most magnetic screen presences. Since his breakout as the taciturn, slow-burning Mr. Gu in "My Liberation Notes" at age 39 — a role that sparked its own mini-phenomenon, the so-called "Son Suk-ku syndrome" — he's been on a remarkable tear, stacking hits across film and television with a consistency few actors manage.
The low-key intensity in his gaze, natural delivery and a knack for layered antiheroes — that's the brand. Here are five things worth knowing about the man himself.
He speaks perfect English
Son's English-speaking chops have turned up in projects like Netflix's "Sense8" and the Disney+ casino thriller "Big Bet." It's good enough to carry substantial scenes and there's a reason: he spent much of his youth abroad.
Son left Korea for the US in middle school and eventually enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, studying visual arts and film with dreams of becoming a documentary filmmaker.
After completing his Korean military service, he landed in Canada, where his brother lived, and briefly tried his hand at professional basketball. That didn't work out, so he turned to acting classes instead, and the rest followed.
One footnote: you may catch a whiff of Italian American inflection in his delivery, and that might be down to his early acting exercises. "When I first started acting, I would memorize nearly all his lines from 'Scarface,'" he told Esquire Korea in 2024. "I used to mimic Al Pacino's Italian accent even though I'm not Italian."
He served in Iraq
Son memorably played the slick, ambitious Captain Im Ji-seop in Netflix's military drama "D.P.," but his actual service record is grittier than any script. During his mandatory stint in the Korean Army, he volunteered for a peacekeeping contingent deployed to Iraq from 2005 to 2006.
"I wanted to experience as much as I could while I was serving," he recalled in a 2018 interview with Vogue Korea. "They were only taking one infantryman. I've never faced that kind of competition in my entire acting career."
He owns an industrial equipment maker
Here's one you don't see coming: Son is listed as a major shareholder of GOMT, a Daejeon-based equipment maker that ships to a handful of countries. It's a family business — his grandfather founded it, and Son was involved in operations before turning to acting.
On a talk show appearance in 2022, he described his time doing door-to-door sales for the company: "I couldn't sell a single unit." Still, he noted, the experience paid off. "That sales grind ended up helping when I had to go around pitching myself as an actor."
He's since stepped away from day-to-day operations, though he remains the company's biggest stakeholder.
"Being a businessman and an actor are such different worlds," he told Woman Donga in 2025. "It's taught me to think about balance, to be romantic but also realistic and rational."
He considers Confucius his acting coach (sort of)
The story goes like this: Back when work was scarce, Son would spend his days at a teahouse near his home, passing time with elders in the neighborhood.
The old men recommended the Confucian classics to the aspiring actor — the Analects, the Doctrine of the Mean — and he went down the rabbit hole, even enrolling in Chinese-language classes just to read the originals. He's kept at it ever since.
"Whenever I feel overwhelmed, I go back to those texts," the actor told local media in 2023. The emphasis on balance and acting appropriately to circumstance seems to have shaped his approach to performance. "Doctrine of the Mean is about constantly asking yourself what state you need to be in to act rightly in a given moment. That felt a lot like acting to me."
He's been branching out behind the camera
Son founded his own one-man production outfit, Stannum, in early 2024, a move that shows his ambition to take on more creative control as a writer or director.
He'd already given it a shot in 2021 when he wrote and directed the short film "Rebroadcast," an episode in the anthology project "Unframed."
By his own account, the process was excruciating. "I spent three months writing and couldn't crack it," he told Esquire Korea in 2024. "Nothing was working, and I was seriously depressed." Writer Moon Jeong-min, who worked on the TV series "Matrimonial Chaos," helped him find his way through.
Since then, Stannum teamed up with Hyundai Motor on "Night Fishing," a 13-minute sci-fi brand film for the automaker. It picked up awards at Fantasia and Cannes Lions.
More projects are in the works, and Son says he's still writing, even if nothing's finished yet. "I want to say something that's mine," he's said.
moonkihoon@heraldcorp.com
