Nameless for Twenty-Six Years ¹

Twenty-six years of small parts, one recent breakout role, and all along, a nine-table noodle counter in Seoul he has been running alone since 2017.

In April 2026, a Korean drama called How to Become a Building Owner in South Korea finished its run, and a supporting actor named Park Seong-il gave the closing interview a line that summarised twenty-six years in one sentence: "I'm an unnamed actor for twenty-six years. These days I hear 'we're watching you closely' and 'it's fun.'"² He had played a minor aide character, Assistant Nam (남보좌관). Losing roughly five kilograms and holding a deliberately blank expression were, by his own account, most of the job.

Twenty-six years is a specific number, and it is his own. The public record of when it started is less specific: one source puts his screen debut around 1999, another says 2004. Either way, the arithmetic on "twenty-six years" lines up closer to the earlier date, which is itself a small illustration of how thin the public record on a working character actor can be, even after a breakout.

Selected credits below: the full list is longer, and several entries in aggregated filmographies could not be independently confirmed for this piece.

He is a graduate of the theatre and film department at Daejin University, and the shape of his career since has been accumulation rather than a single break: reportedly more than thirty film and television credits, almost all in supporting or character parts. Some are recognisable to international audiences without his name attached: he had a role in Moving (무빙, 2023), the Disney+ series that became one of the most-watched Korean dramas of its year.³ Others sit further back: City Hunter (2011), Criminal Minds (2017), Stranger 2 (비밀의 숲2, 2020), the film To My Name (이름에게), and 84 Square Meters (2025). He has also worked in theatre, which does not show up in most online filmographies at all.

None of this reads as a slow start so much as a long one. A working character actor's filmography is mostly a list of days on other people's sets, and the gap between "has worked continuously since around 2000" and "the public noticed him in 2023" is the entire subject of this magazine's actor pieces, condensed into one career.

The counter he runs is in Jangwi-dong, Seongbuk-gu; see the companion location piece for what it serves, and for the address and map.

The detail that made this piece worth writing is not the drama role. Since 2017, on the days he is not on a set, Park Seong-il has run a small snack bar himself: no staff, counter service, a short menu of jjolmyeon, gimbap, tteokbokki and sundae.⁴ When he is filming, the shop is closed. "When I'm not acting, I work at the snack bar," he told one Korean outlet at the end of the drama's run, not as a hardship story, just as a fact about his week.²

The shop is called 드림랜드 (Dreamland). That was, for a while, also this magazine's own working title, a coincidence we noticed only after his name came up for this issue, and had nothing to do with why we picked it in the first place. The magazine has since been renamed; the restaurant, obviously, has not. We are noting it once, here, because it would be stranger not to.

For the shop itself, read the companion piece. For his most substantial screen credit before the drama that finally got him noticed — a co-lead role in a 2023 festival film about three sprinters — read our piece on Sprinter.

1. ¹ SAMPLE COPY: preview build, not a published piece. Park Seong-il is a real person; the restaurant and film named here are real. Everything in this piece is drawn from public sources listed below. It has not been fact-checked or legal-reviewed, no interview was conducted, and the subject has not been contacted. Nothing here should be treated as verified reporting until that review is done.
2. ² Interview quotes translated from Korean-language coverage of the conclusion of How to Become a Building Owner in South Korea (대한민국에서 건물주 되는 법), April 2026, including a Korea Daily (koreadaily.com) report. Translated from Korean by Second Look Korea; wording should be checked against the original article text before publication, as our source for this piece was a summarised extract rather than the full original.
3. ³ Moving (무빙), Disney+, 2023.
4. ⁴ Restaurant details (menu, opening year, solo operation) per aggregated Korean-language coverage of the restaurant's feature on the television programme 생활의 달인 ("Master of Life"), episode 978, broadcast 14 April 2025.

NAME

Park Seong-il · 박성일

BASED IN

Seoul

APPEARED IN

Issue Zero