Anupam Tripathi

Anupam Tripathi is an Indian actor based in Seoul whose fluency in Korean, theatrical discipline and unusually expressive screen presence have made him one of the most recognisable South Asian faces in the Korean entertainment industry. Born in New Delhi on 2 November 1988, he spent more than a decade building a patient, detail-driven career in Korean films and television before the 2021 Netflix phenomenon Squid Game transformed him overnight into a global name and, improbably, one of the most beloved supporting characters in recent streaming memory.

Tripathi's path to Seoul began in the theatre rehearsal rooms of the Indian capital. As a teenager he was drawn to acting after taking the small part of a slave in a stage production of Spartacus, an experience he has repeatedly credited as the moment the craft caught him. From 2006 to 2010 he trained and performed with the playwright Shahid Anwar's Behroop theatre group, absorbing the ensemble ethic and vocal discipline that still underpins his work on camera. His original plan was to apply to the National School of Drama in New Delhi, but in 2010 he won an Arts Major Asian scholarship to the Korea National University of Arts in Seoul, and the plan changed with the plane ticket. He has spoken candidly about the first months of culture shock and language panic; within roughly two years, however, he was conversational in Korean, and he now moves fluently between Korean, Hindi and English.

His first professional screen work came while he was still a student, picking up Korean stage roles, commercials and bit parts in his third year at K-Arts. He made his feature debut as an unnamed Sri Lankan man in Yoon Je-kyoon's box-office blockbuster Ode to My Father in 2014, and over the next several years collected the kind of small, often unnamed roles that form the real apprenticeship of a working screen actor in a foreign industry. He appeared in the horror thriller The Phone in 2015, the Jung Woo-sung crime drama Asura: The City of Madness in 2016 and the comedy Luck-Key the same year. On television he surfaced in the KBS mega-hit Descendants of the Sun in 2016, the OCN psychological horror Strangers from Hell in 2019 as Kumail, and the tvN medical ensemble Hospital Playlist in 2020. He also took a role as a bomb expert in the independence-era play that was selected for the 36th Seoul Theater Festival, keeping a foot in the stage world that had first shaped him.

The part that changed everything was Ali Abdul, the Pakistani migrant worker and Player 199 in Hwang Dong-hyuk's Squid Game. Released on Netflix in September 2021, the series became the streamer's most-watched launch to that point, and Ali's warmth, physical courage and final, devastating betrayal in the marbles round made him the emotional heart of the show for many viewers. Hwang has said he cast Tripathi specifically because good non-Korean actors who can carry dramatic Korean-language scenes are hard to find, and because Tripathi's emotional range was unmistakable in audition. The response was seismic. His Instagram following jumped from around ten thousand to more than two and a half million in a matter of days, and he was invited onto Korean variety shows, international press junkets and awards conversations that had previously been out of reach for a South Asian supporting player in Korea.

Rather than chase the boom with quantity, Tripathi kept working selectively. He had already appeared in the Netflix science-fiction feature Space Sweepers in 2021 as a secretary to the villain played by Richard Armitage, and voiced a preacher in the supernatural thriller The 8th Night the same year. He took a small recurring turn in the JTBC action hit Taxi Driver, and in 2023 joined the JTBC romantic comedy King the Land as Prince Samir, a visiting royal whose extended cameo was a fan favourite and brought him a new, more mainstream K-drama audience. He has also continued to take on film work with directors he respects, including the Korean horror thriller Rhapsody for the Dead, which premiered at the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival and was picked up for release across several Asian territories, and an independent U.K. short on which he served as both actor and executive producer. A further Korean drama role, the character Nimal in the fantasy procedural Oh My Ghost Clients, followed in 2025.

The other significant development of the post-Squid Game years has been his return, on his own terms, to Indian screens. In 2024 he made his Indian web-series debut in Anubhav Sinha's Netflix drama IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack, playing Ram Chandra Yadav, the first officer at the Indian embassy in Kathmandu caught up in the 1999 hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight 814. Tripathi has described the role as a deliberate choice to play a character with a dual personality and to begin bridging the Korean and Indian industries that have shaped him, and he has spoken publicly about wanting to shift perceptions of Indians in Korea and of Korean-trained actors in India through the work he accepts.

Off camera he keeps a notably low-key profile in Seoul, where he has lived for more than fifteen years. He credits his Korean teachers, his K-Arts cohort and the long years of small parts for the composure audiences now read as effortless, and he tends to frame his career less as a breakthrough than as the slow accumulation of craft finally meeting opportunity. For a generation of South Asian performers watching from outside Korea, Tripathi has become a quietly radical figure, proof that a theatre kid from Delhi can become a recurring presence in Korean prime time and, through one unforgettable turn as Ali Abdul, a face the whole world recognises.