Ma Dong-seok

Watch what Ma Dong-seok does when he is not hitting anyone. In Eternals (2021) he plays Gilgamesh, a big, gentle cook who has spent centuries in the Australian outback looking after Angelina Jolie's Thena, a warrior whose mind slips so that she sometimes forgets who he is and comes at him with a blade. He takes it the way a man takes bad weather. He is a large man, and most directors have known what to do with that. Fewer have noticed that he is at his best when he is being careful with somebody.

The punching came first. He boxed and worked as a trainer in America before coming back to South Korea at around thirty, and he began acting in small and supporting parts in the mid-2000s. Notice arrived in 2012 with Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time and The Neighbor. Then Train to Busan (2016) made him Sang-hwa, a protective survivor in a film that made its passengers worth worrying about, which is where the protectiveness first showed on a big scale. The Outlaws (2017) gave him detective Ma Seok-do and a franchise, the Roundup films, which he now also produces through Big Punch Pictures. The Gangster, the Cop, the Devil (2019) put him in a lead crime part, and Eternals was the Hollywood debut.

That debut is the odd case of a middling film doing an actor a favour. Chloé Zhao's Marvel picture stops every ten minutes to explain itself and its monsters are not worth the flight, but she lets Gilgamesh and Thena sit at a table and eat, and those are the best scenes in it. A man in an apron and a woman who occasionally tries to kill him: it moved us more than we expected, and the reason is that Ma plays him as a cook first and a warrior a long way second. The cast is better than the film, and he and Jolie are the part of the cast worth the flight.

The trouble is how seldom anyone asks for that. The signature is the punch, short and heavy, thrown the way a boxer throws it, with the endurance to keep throwing it, and the parts arrive built around it: tough, just, funny when the script allows, protective, and much the same from film to film. The Roundup pictures have been running since 2022 and he is the same man in each of them, and since he produces them, the sameness is his own decision rather than a casting director's. He has said that Seok-do is the character most similar to him. We believe him, and that is rather the problem.

See Train to Busan for the man who stands between the passengers and the dead, and the Gilgamesh scenes for the man who cooks. Then hope a director asks for the second one for a whole film.