Paul Sun-Hyung Lee

2023 National Arts Centre Award

Actor, writer, comedian and geek

A versatile actor, writer, comedian and television host, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee is best known for his starring role as family patriarch Mr. Kim (“Appa”) in Korean–Canadian playwright Ins Choi’s hit play Kim’s Convenience (2011) and its hugely popular television adaptation (2016–21). The show brought the Korean–Canadian immigrant experience into the cultural conversation, first in Canada and then around the world, and established Mr. Lee as a model and an inspiration for a generation of Asian actors.
 
Mr. Lee was born in 1972 in Daejeon, South Korea; his family moved to Canada when he was three months old.
 
Of the international success of Kim’s Convenience, he says, “It was a little show that could. More than anything else, I think what it’s done is opened a lot of doors for other shows created and performed by BIPOC artists. One of Canada’s strengths has always been the diversity and the multiculturalism that we embrace, and that makes us stronger as a whole.”
 
Selected stage credits include Kim’s Convenience (several Toronto productions, a national tour with Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre Company, and off-Broadway), Chimerica, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, Ali & Ali: The Deportation Hearings, and The Monster Under the Bed (for which he was nominated for a Dora Mavor Moore Award).
 
Selected film and television credits include The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett (Captain Carson Teva), The Kids in the Hall (Mr. Lewis), TallBoyz (The Devil), and Family Law (Bert Choi).
 
A self-professed geek who has built his own replica of a proton pack (the fictional device used to capture ghosts in the Ghostbusters movie franchise), in 2022 he was announced as the co-creator and host of Fandemonium, an upcoming TV series delving into the sub-cultures of creators, artists and collectors inspired by franchises such as Star Wars and Ghostbusters, and by video games. He has also been cast as Uncle Iroh in the upcoming Netflix adventure fantasy series Avatar: The Last Airbender.
 
For his performance in Kim’s Convenience, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee won the Toronto Theatre Critics Award for Best Actor and four Canadian Screen Awards for Best Lead Actor, Comedy.