(Park Kkotui’s Movie Garden) An unprecedented brand called Ma Dong-seok

In 2018, at the time of the release of ‘Raging Bull’, I asked Ma Dong-seok. Although he has dug a well called action, he said that there are not many acting seniors in Korea who will follow in his footsteps. At the time and now, there are quite a few representative actors who can refer to action careers such as Dwayne Johnson, Vin Diesel, and Keanu Reeves in Hollywood, but it was a rare situation in Korea. Ma Dong-seok, who is specialized in boxing-based action fighting with a sense of hitting despite his large size, seemed to have no role model to speak of. A career that is polished alone is sometimes a barren law.

At the time, he replied that he was referring to the path taken by Sylvester Stallone in ‘Rocky’ and the late actor Jang Dong-hwi, who appeared in ‘The Marines Who Never Return’ and ‘All Night’. What is noteworthy is that the two actors did not just stop at action acting, but also had a common point in being involved in direct production. This is a fundamentally different direction in that it does not simply stay in the position of being ‘selected’ by the director or producer, but rather takes the position of ‘planning’ the work. This is the path Ma Dong-seok had in mind. His representative work, the ‘Criminal City’ series, is a work in which he was directly involved from the stage of scenario planning and raised his name not only in appearance but also in production.

Occasionally good luck followed. In line with the success of the ‘Crime City’ series, he became a member of the Marvel heroine ‘Eternals’. Of course, the amount of appearances was much smaller than expected. The sequences were too short to meet the expectations of being able to see his bare-fisted action in the MCU. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the role of Gilgamesh, who protects Tena, played by a top star named Angelina Jolie, reassuringly and considerately left a strong impression, and the appearance itself became the best opportunity to ‘recognize your face’ in Hollywood.

It is said that Ma Dong-seok showed some of the action sequences from the filming of ‘Sin City 3’ in advance to Hollywood connections that began to form naturally afterward. In other words, he was diligently publicizing how the action shooting skills he had honed in Korea were being implemented. When we met again in the interview for ‘Sin City 3’, he said that he was startled every time he answered “a day or two, or a few days” to a Hollywood production team’s question, “How long does it take to shoot an action scene like this?” This is the reason why he gained the confidence that Korea is ahead of Hollywood in terms of technology that accurately extracts necessary action scenes in a short period of time.

I watched him in several interviews and he is a clever character who knows how to accurately grasp his situation and limitations. As he mentioned, his shoulder and spine were severely injured in a motorcycle accident on an icy road when he was a child working as a delivery man to earn money, and now his physical condition is not very good. It is said that his shoulder injury flared up again as he overlapped filming ‘The Eternals’, where he “was punching in the air for six weeks with 8 cameras for one action scene”. Judging from his age in his 50s, he is at a critical juncture in his life where he has to hone his skills as a producer without physical limitations rather than going all-in on a role as an action actor whose lifespan is set.

Ma Dong-seok has already made a name for himself in production as well as appearing in ‘The Bad Man’, which is being remade in Hollywood. He is said to be preparing to ‘produce’ an action movie with Matt Jackson, producer of the Netflix movie ‘Trial of the Chicago 7’. He said he found a connection with Jiu-Jitsu maniac Matt Jackson. ‘Criminal City’, which has become a prominent franchise in Korea, is also said to be designing a series after considering changes due to the aging of the main character, detective Maseok-do. Because he is a ‘producer’, he can flexibly adjust the options that suit his situation as the lead actor. This is the point at which one wonders how far the ‘unprecedented brand of Ma Dong-seok’, which digs a well, does not miss the luck that followed, and finds a way to supplement its own limits, will evolve.