A Study on Actor Don Lee's Star Persona

In this paper, I study the characteristics of a hugely successful movie starring Don Lee, f rom three perspectives. This paper defines t he “Don Lee phenomenon”, the fact that an actor emphasizing the body like Don Lee became the best actor in Korean films, and analyzes this phenomenon from three perspectives. First, I examine how Don Lee was distinguished from the best male stars in traditional Korean films. Second, I compare the hard-body movies that dominated the movie industry of Hollywood in the 1980’s, when actors with strong bodies, similar to Don Lee, to movies starring Don Lee. Finally, I compare The Outlaws series, which starred Don Lee and reached ten million viewers, with the existing ten-million-viewer-mark movies. The study results are as follows. First, it is very unusual for an actor like Don Lee to become a top star in the existing Korean film history. Second, both the movies starring Don Lee and the hard-body films of Hollywood in the 1980’s share more differences than similarities in many areas: character representation, antagonist settings, and ideology. Third, The Outlaws series is even closer to American ten-million-viewer movies that emphasize poetic justice, happy endings, and super heroes, than Korean ten-millionviewer movies that emphasize fatherhood, familialism, tears, and spectacles. Therefore, the “Don Lee phenomenon”, which has become the top brand today, can be described as highly exceptional.