Do we like Song Kang-ho?
Our score: 8 out of 10. A clean record on harm, a decent one on character, and a thin file that stops us calling it a perfect ten.
Song Kang-ho is the actor the world met properly through Parasite, and the one who then took the best actor prize at Cannes for Broker in 2022. By the reporting we read, he's a working actor rather than a brand: no podcast, no hot takes, just films. That's why the file on him is thin, and we'll say so up front.
His closest brush with a stoush was in late 2024. At a press premiere for the film 1 Win, he described women's volleyball with a Korean word that means roughly “charming”, and social media pushed back, saying it belittled the players. Days later he said he'd chosen the wrong words and apologised to anyone who felt uncomfortable. No grovelling and no doubling down, which is the right way to cop it.
The bigger political story is one where he was on the receiving end. In 2016, Hankook Ilbo reported that the office of then-president Park Geun-hye had a list of artists to be denied government support, and that those who signed a 2015 declaration over the Sewol ferry disaster were on it. Song signed that declaration, and Screen Daily reported he was named. The list's authenticity was disputed by ruling-party legislators at the time.
On the harm test, we searched for anything he's said or done about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, health or the planet, and found nothing harmful. The volleyball remark is the only misstep, and it was a word, not a position. His recent work is more of the same: Gardeners, a Korean comedy with Koo Kyo-hwan and Song Seung-heon, directed by Nam Dong-hyup, with no dodgy company in sight.
On the good stuff, he gave KRW 100 million to the Hope Bridge Association's disaster relief for wildfire victims in July 2022, and it was his second gift of a similar size that year. His agency said he wanted to return fans' support. On winning at Cannes he said the aim is “to communicate with audiences through a good piece of work”, not to collect trophies.
Nothing new has surfaced on him lately beyond work. In January 2026 it was announced he'd lead Gardeners as a civil servant who loves growing plants, with filming due in 2026. The tabloid sites chatter about his private life, but we found nothing from a proper outlet, so we've left it alone.