Choi Hyun-wook is rarely with out the sting or vitality that makes him an incredible actor. His pure appeal, I really feel, is the explanation that gained’t allow you to promote him quick, regardless of the function he’s voicing. Choi form of owns who he turns into on-screen with exact management, giving the character a way of substance in addition to sensitivity.
Acting wasn’t his plan, no less than not till he suffered an irreparable damage that halted his 10-year baseball profession and prompted him to department out into performing. His first break in Korean leisure got here in 2019 as he bought by way of an audition, touchdown a spot within the internet sitcom Real: Time: Love. Choi will need to have drawn discover for his work since, following that, he had a job within the internet drama Pop Out Boy! (2020).
On-screen, the “bad guy” is definitely mysterious as a result of he performs on the nuanced emotions and instincts sleeping within us, although the “good guy” is normally liked. So, conflicting individuals and depraved ones pique our intrigue. And Choi has a manner of pulling that off with aplomb, evoking ideas of his portrayals in 2021’s Taxi Driver and Racket Boys. While he was a reckless faculty bully in Taxi Driver, he changed into a sort peacemaker in Racket Boys and gained Best New Actor on the 2021 SBS Drama Awards for the performances.
Choi Hyun-wook, 22, on the time of writing, is one with vivid expressions and persuasiveness, an honesty that intensifies the sentimental features of a narrative. It’s nice to watch him play somebody like that, and it’s all of the extra spectacular to me that he’s able to mixing delicate moments of drama, humor, and pressure so properly. No marvel his elements in hits like Twenty-Five Twenty-One (2022), Weak Hero Class 1 (2022), and D.P. 2 (2021-2023) bought him gold stars.
Weak Hero Class 1, primarily based on the webtoon Weak Hero, earned him the Whynot Award on the Blue Dragon Series Awards in 2023. Its first three episodes debuted on the twenty seventh Busan International Film Festival and shortly turned a smash, including to Choi’s identify. In a category stuffed with merciless bullying, he performs Ahn Su-ho, a tricky excessive schooler greatest identified for his combating expertise. Choi expertly weaves Su-ho’s bohemian, gregarious character, temper, allegiance, and generosity alongside his combative prowess and repeatedly places himself on the road for his pals. His presence displays the fervour that permeates the act and provides the actor the ability to enliven the drama with profound that means.
Choi expanded his horizons with the thriller crime thriller internet sequence High Cookie (2023), co-starring Nam Ji-hyun. Here, Choi is an exemplary scholar in an elitist highschool and a perceived good man, who, by the best way, is the baker of the titular cookie that, whereas it grants needs with a single chunk, can be catastrophic if consumed for a second time. Choi’s and the forged’s fame took off as High Cookie turned successful story.
Yet, in my ebook, Twinkling Watermelon—the fantasy romance drama, second on our checklist of the 10 best K-dramas of 2023—is Choi Hyun-wook’s greatest to date. It’s an perception into the essence of life and relationships, primarily based on the bizarre escapades of Ha Eun-gyeol (Ryeoun), a highschool scholar whose mother and father and elder brother are deaf-mute. Following an occasion, he one way or the other time-travels to 1995 and meets his father, Ha Yi-chan (Choi), who was 18 on the time and will hear and communicate! Yi-chan is shocked to hear Eun-gyeol name him dad. Eun-gyeol, equally bewildered, begins trying to find solutions and shortly joins Yi-chan’s band, which units off an epic story of romance, friendship, humor, and discoveries.
Not to point out how inventively music serves as its cathartic component—its unpredictable nature, stuffed with subtleties and delicate cases centered on the characters and their pasts—is what makes it so fantastic. Choi shines in each scene and inch of what he does within the present. Shout out to the second within the remaining chapter of the story the place he becomes deaf and tears in front of his grandmother. That hits very shut to dwelling.
