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'Hippy Granddad' O Yeong-su Wins S.Korea's First Golden Globe for 'Squid Game' Role

This handout image released by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) shows HFPA Grantee, Founder and Executive Director of Kids in the Spotlight Tige Charity, presenting the Best Performance by a Supporting Actor in a Series, Limited Series, or Television Movie Award on stage during the 79th Annual Golden Globe Awards at The Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, California, Sunday. Korean actor O Yeong-su won the award at this year's Golden Globe Awards. (AFP)
This handout image released by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) shows HFPA Grantee, Founder and Executive Director of Kids in the Spotlight Tige Charity, presenting the Best Performance by a Supporting Actor in a Series, Limited Series, or Television Movie Award on stage during the 79th Annual Golden Globe Awards at The Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, California, Sunday. Korean actor O Yeong-su won the award at this year's Golden Globe Awards. (AFP)
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'Hippy Granddad' O Yeong-su Wins S.Korea's First Golden Globe for 'Squid Game' Role

This handout image released by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) shows HFPA Grantee, Founder and Executive Director of Kids in the Spotlight Tige Charity, presenting the Best Performance by a Supporting Actor in a Series, Limited Series, or Television Movie Award on stage during the 79th Annual Golden Globe Awards at The Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, California, Sunday. Korean actor O Yeong-su won the award at this year's Golden Globe Awards. (AFP)
This handout image released by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) shows HFPA Grantee, Founder and Executive Director of Kids in the Spotlight Tige Charity, presenting the Best Performance by a Supporting Actor in a Series, Limited Series, or Television Movie Award on stage during the 79th Annual Golden Globe Awards at The Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, California, Sunday. Korean actor O Yeong-su won the award at this year's Golden Globe Awards. (AFP)

South Korean actor O Yeong-su won the country's first Golden Globe award on Sunday for his role in Netflix hit "Squid Game", drawing cheers at home and abroad despite criticism for the ceremony's organizers over a lack of diversity.

O, 77, won best supporting actor in television for his portrayal of Oh II-nam, also known as The Host or Player 001, becoming the first South Korean ever to snatch a Golden Globe.

He beat more globally renowned competitors including Billy Crudup and Kieran Culkin, who were respectively nominated for their performances in The Morning Show and Succession.

This year's ceremony was held privately without the usual glitzy fanfare after many actors, directors and film studios refused to attend amid criticism that its organizer, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, lacked decent ethics policies and ethnic diversity.

"After hearing the news, I told myself for the first time, 'you're a nice dude,'" O said in a statement released by Netflix.

"It's no longer us within the world, it's the world within us. Embracing the scent of our culture and the love for my family, Thank all of you in the world. I wish you a beautiful life."

O's achievement came after Youn Yuh-jung won best supporting actress at last year's Academy Awards, the first South Korean to win an Oscar, for her role in "Minari," a heartfelt Korean immigrant tale.

Dystopian drama
"Squid Game", in which cash-strapped contestants play childhood games with deadly consequences in a bid to win 45.6 billion won ($38.1 million), had triggered a worldwide sensation and became Netflix's biggest original series launch.

In the nine-part show, O posed as a frail, harmless old man, before eventually revealing his true identity as the sinister orchestrator of the games.

The dystopian drama has inspired countless real world recreations and social media memes in South Korea, including his use of the term "kkanbu", which roughly translates as "friend", propelling his popularity as a hippy "kkanbu grandpa".

Born in 1944 in what is now a North Korean border town of Kaepung, O is regarded as one of the greatest stage actors in South Korea, appearing in more than 200 stage productions since 1963 and winning a number of major awards.

He has also played many charismatic supporting characters in film and television, including in "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring" released in 2003 by late award-winning director Kim Ki-duk.

O's portrayals of a Buddhist monk in that 2003 movie and others won him the nickname "monk actor" and several television commercials.

He said during a TV appearance in October that he had decided to join "Squid Game" out of appreciation for the director's insight over social irregularities.

"Our society goes by as if only No. 1 survives. No. 2 lost to No. 1, but beat No. 3. After all, everybody is a winner," he said then.

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Movie Review: From Bumper to Bumper, ‘F1’ Is Formula One Spectacle 

Brad Pitt, from left, Lewis Hamilton, and Damson Idris attend the world premiere of "F1 The Movie" on Monday, June 16, 2025, in Times Square in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
Brad Pitt, from left, Lewis Hamilton, and Damson Idris attend the world premiere of "F1 The Movie" on Monday, June 16, 2025, in Times Square in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
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Movie Review: From Bumper to Bumper, ‘F1’ Is Formula One Spectacle 

Brad Pitt, from left, Lewis Hamilton, and Damson Idris attend the world premiere of "F1 The Movie" on Monday, June 16, 2025, in Times Square in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
Brad Pitt, from left, Lewis Hamilton, and Damson Idris attend the world premiere of "F1 The Movie" on Monday, June 16, 2025, in Times Square in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

The wide-screen spectacle of Formula One gets a gleaming, rip-roaring workout in Joseph Kosinski’s “F1,” a fine-tuned machine of a movie that, in its most riveting racing scenes, approaches a kind of high-speed splendor.

Kosinski, who last endeavored to put moviegoers in the seat of a fighter jet in “Top Gun: Maverick,” has moved to the open cockpits of Formula One with much the same affection, if not outright need, for speed. A lot of the same team is back. Jerry Bruckheimer produces. Ehren Kruger, a co-writer on “Maverick,” takes sole credit here. Hans Zimmer, a co-composer previously, supplies the thumping score.

And, again, our central figure is an older, high-flying cowboy plucked down in an ultramodern, gas-guzzling conveyance to teach a younger generation about old-school ingenuity and, maybe, the enduring appeal of denim.

But whereas Tom Cruise is a particularly forward-moving action star, Brad Pitt, who stars as the driving-addicted Sonny Hayes in “F1,” has always been a more arrestingly poised presence. Think of the way he so calmly and half-interestedly faces off with Bruce Lee in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood.” In the opening scene of “F1,” he’s sleeping in a van with headphones on when someone rouses him. He splashes some water on his face and walks a few steps over to the Daytona oval, where he quickly enters his team’s car, in the midst of a 24-hour race. Pitt goes from zero to 180 mph in a minute.

Sonny, a long-ago phenom who crashed out of Formula One decades earlier and has since been racing any vehicle, even a taxi, he can get behind the wheel of, is approached by an old friend, Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem) about joining his flagging F1 team, APX. Sonny turns him down at first but, of course, he joins and “F1” is off to the races.

The title sequence, exquisitely timed to the syncopated rhythms of Zimmer’s score, is a blistering introduction. The hotshot rookie driver Noah Pearce (Damson Idris) is just running a practice lap, but Kosinski, his camera adeptly moving in and out of the cockpit, uses the moment to plunge us into the high-tech world of Formula One, where every inch of the car is connected to digital sensors monitored by a watchful team. Here, that includes technical director Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon) and Kaspar Molinski (Kim Bodnia), the team’s chief.

Verisimilitude is of obvious importance to the filmmakers, who bathe this very Formula One-authorized film in all the sleek operations and globe-trotting spectacle of the sport. That Apple, which produced the film, would even go for such a high-priced summer movie about Formula One is a testament to the upswing in popularity of a sport once quite niche in America, and of the halo effects of both the Netflix series “Formula 1: Drive to Survive” and the seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton, an executive producer on “F1.”

Whether “F1” pleases diehards, I’ll leave to more ardent followers of the circuit. But what I can say definitively is that Claudio Miranda knows how to shoot it. The cinematographer, who has shot all of Kosinski’s films as well as wonders like Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi,” brings Formula One to vivid, visceral life. When “F1” heads to the big races, Miranda is always simultaneously capturing the zooming cars from the asphalt while backgrounding it with the sweeping spectacle of a course like the UK’s fabled Silverstone Circuit.

OK, you might be thinking, so the racing is good; is there a story? There’s what I’d call enough of one, though you might have to go to the photo finish to verify that. When Sonny shows up, and rapidly turns one practice vehicle into toast, it’s clear that he’s going to be an agent of chaos at APX, a low-ranking team that’s in heavy debt and struggling to find a car that performs.

This gives Pitt a fine opportunity to flash his charisma, playing Sonny as an obsessive who refuses any trophy and has no real interest in money, either. The flashier, media-ready Noah watches Sonny's arrival with skepticism, and the two begin more as rivals than teammates. Idris is up to the mano-a-mano challenge, but he’s limited by a role ultimately revolving around and reducing to a young Black man learning a lesson in work ethic.

A relationship does develop, but “F1” struggles to get its characters out of the starting blocks, keeping them closer to the cliches they start out as. The actor who, more than anyone, keeps the momentum going is Condon, playing an aerodynamics specialist whose connection with Pitt’s Sonny is immediate. Just as she did in between another pair of headstrong men in “The Banshees of Inisherin,” Condon is a rush of naturalism.

If there’s something preventing “F1” from hitting full speed, it’s its insistence on having its characters constantly voice Sonny’s motivations. The same holds true on the race course, where broadcast commentary narrates virtually every moment of the drama. That may be a necessity for a sport where the crucial strategies of hot tires and pit-stop timing aren't quite household concepts. But the best car race movies — from “Grand Prix” to “Senna” to “Ferrari” — know when to rely on nothing but the roar of an engine.

“F1” steers predictably to the finish line, cribbing here and there from sports dramas before it. (Tobias Menzies plays a board member with uncertain corporate goals.) When “F1” does, finally, quiet down, for one blissful moment, the movie, almost literally, soars. It's not quite enough to forget all the high-octane macho dramatics before it, but it's enough to glimpse another road “F1” might have taken.