According to Seoul officials, Lee Sun-kyun, a South Korean actor who gained international recognition for his portrayal of the affluent patriarch in the Oscar-winning movie Parasite, was discovered dead on Wednesday in what appeared to be a suicide in a park.
In the midst of a government crackdown, Lee, 48, met a grisly end in the 2019 film, which became South Korea’s first-ever Oscar winner. During the weekend, he was questioned by police three times on suspicion of using illegal drugs. One of those sessions lasted 19 hours. According to the Yonhap news agency, the actor claimed that a bar hostess had deceived him into ingesting narcotics in an attempt to blackmail him.
A fire official told Reuters, under condition of anonymity, that Lee was discovered by authorities during a search that was prompted by a missing person complaint. The issue at hand is delicate. According to a police official who spoke on condition of anonymity, Lee was discovered in a car in a park in Seoul after his manager informed authorities the actor had left home and left behind what appeared to be a suicide note. Calls to Lee’s agency, HODU&U Entertainment, went unanswered.
The agency did, however, release a statement that was quoted by the local media, expressing regret for the loss and advising caution when it came to rumors, conjecture, or malicious reports. Violations of the severe drug laws in South Korea carry a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison for repeat offenders and dealers, or six months in detention.
After receiving six Oscar nominations, Bong Joon-ho’s dark-comedy thriller Parasite won the Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Feature Film Oscars in 2020. The movie won the Best Picture Oscar, making it the first non-English film to do so. Bong celebrated its widespread appeal as evidence that the “one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles” was no longer an obstacle to success on a worldwide scale.
In the movie, Lee plays Mr. Park, a wealthy man whose home is broken into by members of a lower class family posing as highly skilled domestic staff in a complex plot that culminates in bloodshed.
Lee, who was born in 1975, starred in several South Korean films, including the critically praised 2018 TV series My Mister and the 2012 thriller Helpless and 2014’s All About My Wife. In the first Korean-language original series for Apple TV+, which debuted in 2021, he portrayed the lead role.
Dr. Brain is a six-episode science fiction thriller about a heartless physician using brain research to try and piece together the details of an unexplained family disaster. Jeon Hye-jin, an award-winning actress, is Lee’s wife. The two of them have two children.
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