Squid Game's Ali - aka Anupam Tripathi - has given South Korea's foreign actors their big break. Meet the entertainers hoping to follow his lead

The South Korean Netflix hit Squid Game is breaking barriers on what seems like a daily basis.

The dystopian drama, in which desperate and indebted people take part in deadly games to win a massive pot of money, has not only beaten the period drama Bridgerton to become the platform's biggest series launch, it has become Netflix's biggest show ever, reaching a mind-boggling 142 million households in its first four weeks.

It is also the streaming giant's first South Korean television show to have become the most popular series in the United States. And that's not the only cross-cultural barrier the drama, written and directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk, has overcome.

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One of its stars, Anupam Tripathi, who plays a Pakistani factory worker named Abdul Ali who takes part in the game to win money for his family, has become an inspiration to South Korea's hitherto underappreciated ranks of foreign actors.

It is unusual for a foreign actor to be given such a major role in South Korea, and partly because of this the 32-year-old from India has become an overnight celebrity in the country, and the wider world (he now has nearly four million Instagram followers, compared to 3,000 before Squid Game came out).

Indeed, such is Squid Game's popularity that even Carlo Aquino, the Filipino actor who was originally given the role of Ali but had to give it up due to Covid-19 travel restrictions, has received a boost to his profile. An Instagram post by Aquino last week showing him wearing the signature green Squid Game tracksuit alongside the caption, "Better late than never", has prompted speculation from fans that the actor will appear in a second season.

Tripathi's success has made him a symbol of hope to hundreds of foreign actors and entertainers hoping for their own big breaks, among them Noreen Joyce Guerra, a 29-year-old actress from the Philippines.

"I've heard about Anupam's hard work, passion and his kind attitude towards other people," said Guerra, speaking from a movie set in Uiseong-gun, a rural county in the province of Gyeongbuk.

"He has inspired me to work hard and prove that foreigners can go further in this industry."

The Roxas City native is part of the main cast in Beautiful Days, a romantic comedy about a curling prodigy with a rare and potentially fatal disease which flares up whenever the character feels strong emotions.

Landing the role was a massive surprise for Guerra, who had previously appeared in more than 60 South Korean television dramas and commercials but nearly always as a background actor.

"I don't really see myself focusing on acting because the roles available for foreigners - especially Southeast Asians - are still very limited in the industry," she said.

In fact, Guerra landed her first role in 2018 because the casting director thought she looked Korean and she continued to appear as minor Korean characters for the first year of her career before landing her first speaking role. But she feels her accent, which is noticeably foreign, has limited her roles.

"For now, the roles available for Southeast Asians are immigrant workers and the wives in multicultural families in South Korea," she said, adding that this jarred with her experience of real life in the country where Southeast Asian workers were employed as "teachers, professors, businesspeople, students and office workers".

Guerra's own life attests to this. To pay the bills she also works as a manager at a financial services firm in Seoul, where her colleagues are among her biggest fans and treat her "like a family member and not just a foreign colleague".

Notable though Tripathi's Squid Game success is, he is not the first actor from overseas to have made it big in Korea.

Back in 2005, the debut of Daniel Henney in the classic television drama My Lovely Sam Soon was unprecedented. While Henney had Korean heritage - an American father and a Korean-American mother - audiences widely assumed the tall and handsome actor was completely foreign. His Korean was broken and most of his dialogues were in English.

Over the years there were other breakout performances, such as by Jasmine Lee who played the Filipino mother in the 2011 movie Punch.

Yet in the bigger scheme of things such appearances were fleeting, and to this day the big screen has failed to reflect the increasing multiculturalism of South Korean society.

"In addition to foreigners being under-represented on screen, foreign roles in movies mostly dealt with cliches such as labour issues, the inter-Korean problem or defectors from the north," said veteran movie editor Park Hyeeun, the chief editorial officer at The Screen.

"This is because our society has a closed point of view towards foreigners in our country.

"If foreigners in other countries look to settle in their new homes, foreigners living in South Korea are expected to go back home after their work or studies here are finished," Park said.

"Rather than embracing multicultural families, our society is seen to exclude them in many instances. This can become a major obstacle in foreign actors confidently acting out their characters on screen."

Even so, South Korea has never given out more entertainment visas - the E-6-1 - than today.

From 375 holders of the visa in 2010, as of last month there were 973. And this surge has been accompanied by a rise in entertainment agencies catering to foreign actors and entertainers.

Jay Han, a South Korean, started his management company Fivestones ENT in 2019. He credits the television show Abnormal Summit, a talk show featuring an all-foreign panel in the style of the UN assembly, for changing people's mindsets.

"Before Abnormal Summit, foreigners who appeared on television didn't have agencies as they had mostly appeared on set by chance," Han said. Most panel members on Abnormal Summit were men who had come to South Korea to work in other professions.

"But after Abnormal Summit became a household show, TV producers realised that an all-foreign cast could work."

Since then, variety shows like Welcome, First Time In Korea and South Korean Foreigners - which focus on how well foreigners speak Korean and know its culture - have managed to succeed with largely foreign casts, with some cast members going on to star in more mainstream dramas and commercials.

Guerra, the Filipino actress, first came to South Korea to get a Master's degree in Business Administration and decided to stay after landing a job at a financial management company. She started replying to adverts for film extras as a chance to earn extra money and glimpse some of her favourite stars.

But it was her grasp of the Korean language and culture - which Guerra puts down to her love of K-pop and K-drama since an early age - that caught the attention of producers.

A fellow artist at Fivestones ENT, Mariel Sandra Korbe, arrived in South Korea in 2016 after winning first prize in a language contest sponsored by the Korea Foundation in her home country of Estonia.

She had begun learning Korean at the age of 15 through YouTube channels like Talk to Me in Korean, and honed her skills at university and graduate school in South Korea. After starting her own YouTube channel in 2019, she began to get requests from broadcast stations to appear on their shows.

In addition to appearing on South Korean Foreigners and being a host on Arirang TV's See What I See 3, a travel show in which foreign hosts visit travel destinations in South Korea, the 25-year-old gets offers from companies and cultural centers to appear in their promotional videos.

"I first became interested in South Korea because the culture here was so different from the one I grew up in," she said. "And, now, it's my goal to be an ambassador for Estonia."

And the more Korbe appears on screen, the more people learn about her small Northern European homeland.

Fivestones ENT's Han, who manages Korbe, said the market for foreign entertainers had come a long way but was still far from profitable for most.

"A lot of foreign entertainers make about two to three million won (US$1,700 to US$2,550) a month, barely enough to sustain a living here," Han said.

Waiting for the big break

These days, Han receives a lot of calls from people abroad who see being signed by his entertainment agency as their ticket to South Korea. He even opened an Instagram account for Iranians who would be interested in auditioning for his agency. The account got around 4,000 followers in a matter of days.

"If aspiring actors and singers used to flock to America to enrol in UC Berkeley and other top institutions, foreign students are now also applying to universities in Seoul to get formal acting classes here," Han said. "South Korea is gradually looking like Asia's Hollywood."

This was the path tread by Squid Game's Tripathi, one of the few foreign students in his year to graduate from the Korea National University of Arts in Seoul, a distinguished institute that counts among its alumni such stars as Lee Sun-kyun and Park So-dam of Academy Award-winning Parasite fame.

Even today there are only a handful of foreign students at the institute, where enrolment processes heavily favour South Koreans. The situation is similar at Kookmin University and Dongduk Women's University.

"But we've come to the point where it's become almost necessary to have a foreign member in your drama series or K-pop group," Han said. "K-pop was the first to see the need for this as most major girl bands like Blackpink have at least one foreign member. The advantages of having foreign members are too great in today's global market to ignore."

The movie editor Park Hyeeun predicted Squid Game, and Tripathi's breakout success, would bring a monumental change.

"It will become increasingly difficult for South Korean content to get a positive response from the global audience with stories that have only South Korean faces and closed-minded, social perspectives," she said.

"Cultural content not only reflects society but also foreshadows society's future in a hopeful light."

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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