Oh Man-seok (born January 30, 1975) is a South Korean actor. Best known for playing the titular transgender singer in rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Oh's acting career spans theater, television and film.
Career
Theater beginnings
Oh Man-seok graduated from the School of Drama at Korea National University of Arts with a BFA in Acting. He made his stage debut in Faust in 1999. One of his early notable roles was as the androgynous court jester Gong-gil who becomes the object of obsession of the tyrant King Yeonsan in Yi, which would later be adapted into the hit 2005 film King and the Clown. Highly acclaimed for his portrayal of Gong-gil, Oh was awarded Best New Actor by the National Theater Association of Korea for the play's first run in 2000, and he reprised the role four more times in 2001, 2003, 2006, and 2010.
More roles followed in The Rocky Horror Show (2001), Return to the Forbidden Planet (2002), Grease (2003), Singin' in the Rain (2004), The Seagull (2004), Woyzeck (2004), and Assassins (2005).
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
But Oh became a bonafide musical theatre superstar in 2005, when he was cast as the titular East German transgender singer in the first Korean staging of the rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch. As the first "Korean Hedwig," Oh received sensational reviews for his performance and he won Best Actor at the Korea Musical Awards. After its run, a sold-out concert featured four of the actors alternating in the lead role, namely Oh, Cho Seung-woo, Kim Da-hyun and Song Yong-jin.
In succeeding years, the rock musical's popularity remained enduring in Korea, attracting other actors to the role in later runs, such as Um Ki-joon, Jo Jung-suk, Song Chang-eui, Yoon Do-hyun, Kim Dong-wan and Park Gun-hyung. When John Cameron Mitchell, who wrote, directed and played the original Hedwig in the 1998 musical and the 2001 film, went to Korea in 2007 to hold a concert, Oh was one of his guest performers, along with other Korean Hedwig actors. Oh was also able to talk to Mitchell one-on-one, without an interpreter, for one and a half hours. Both agreed that the role was emotionally and physically consuming, and Oh added that he used to sit absentmindedly with a cigarette for 20 minutes after finishing his performance. A year later in 2008, Mitchell returned to Korea, and he and Oh headlined a concert to commemorate Hedwig'''s 10th anniversary.
In 2012, seven years after the role made him famous, Oh reprised Hedwig for the rock musical's seventh run in Korea. At a press conference, he jokingly talked about shaving his legs again and being banned from his favorite activities like eating meat, working out, and drinking alcohol, but said that the role was "certainly worth the ordeal." Oh said, "This musical tells us that to love someone is to accept him exactly the way he is. It also tells us that everyone deserves to be loved, and every individual is meaningful and important. I think that's the essential message of this piece."
From stage to screen
Besides portraying Hedwig, 2005 was also significant in Oh's career because of his appearance in the critically acclaimed period drama Shin Don set in Goryeo. He had played minor roles in film and TV before, but the Buddhist monk Wonhyeon was his first major supporting role. (Oh later made a cameo in the 2010 Korean War drama Road No. 1 as a favor to Shin Don director Kim Jin-min.)
In 2006, Oh achieved mainstream fame with the television series The Vineyard Man (also known as The Man of the Vineyard), in his first onscreen leading role as a country guy in charge of a vineyard, who gradually falls for a hapless city girl determined to work there in order to inherit it. The romantic comedy initially had low ratings, but it later surprisingly held its own against ratings juggernaut Jumong, unlike other Korean dramas in the same timeslot. Oh won Best New Actor and the Popularity Award at the 2006 KBS Drama Awards, and he and costar Yoon Eun-hye were voted as the Best Couple among the network's dramas.
Later that year, Oh took on a very different role in Hyena, a risque cable drama about the love lives of a group of four male friends. Oh played a successful, urbane man with such high standards for "the perfect woman," that he's overly fastidious and critical to his dates.
In 2007, he was cast in his first big-screen leading role as a crime fiction novelist in the thriller Our Town. This was followed by the historical drama The King and I, which centered on the tragic love between King Seongjong, his royal concubine and a self-sacrificing eunuch (played by Oh, for which he won Best Actor in a Serial Drama at the SBS Drama Awards).