Paul Sun-Hyung Lee

When Lee was three months old, his parents emigrated from Daejeon, Chungnam, South Korea, to Canada. They lived successively in London, Toronto, and Calgary.^[1]

In 1990, Lee moved back to Ontario to attend the University of Toronto. He studied in the drama program at University College.^[2]

Lee made his acting debut in 1989 in the television series Gideon Oliver.^[3] He had a supporting role in the film Ice Princess (2005) playing Tiffany's father. Lee appeared in the horror film P2 and the thriller The Echo. In 2006, he took the role of Jung Park in the video game Rainbow Six: Vegas and its 2008 sequel Rainbow Six: Vegas 2.^[4]

Lee was part of the main cast of the Global nightly improvised soap opera Train 48 in the role of Randy Ko for the entire run of the series from 2003 to 2005.^[5]

In 2012, Lee won the Best Actor citation from the Toronto Theatre Critics' Awards for his portrayal of Kim Sang-il in Kim's Convenience.^[6] He played the role of Appa on stage in several Toronto productions of Kim's Convenience and on a national tour with the Soulpepper theatre company, as well as at an Off Broadway staging of the play.^[5] He brought the role of Appa to television in 2016 when the show was adapted as a television series.^[5] In 2016, Lee played Zhang Lin in the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre/Canadian Stage production of Chimerica.^[7] On January 11, 2017, he guest starred on an episode of This Hour Has 22 Minutes.

Lee has been nominated twice for the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male in a Principal Role, Large Theatre, for The Monster Under the Bed in 2010 and Kim's Convenience in 2012.^[8] In the 5th, 6th, and 9th Canadian Screen Awards, he won the Best Actor in a Comedy Series for his portrayal of Appa in the Kim's Convenience television series.^[9] Lee was selected to host the fourth season of the reality competition show Canada's Smartest Person, entitled Canada's Smartest Person Junior and featuring children as contestants.^[10]

Lee is also a playwright. His play Dangling premiered N8at Toronto's fu-GEN theatre festival in 2010.^[11]

In 2020, he began portraying New Republic X-wing pilot Captain Carson Teva in The Mandalorian,^[12][13][14] appearing in two episodes of Season 2 ("Chapter 10: The Passenger" and "Chapter 12: The Siege") and twice more in Season 3 ("Chapter 21: The Pirate" and "Chapter 24: The Return").^[15] Lee continued to reprise the role in various Star Wars franchise-related media such as The Book of Boba Fett ("Chapter 5: Return of the Mandalorian") in 2022,^[16] three episodes of Ahsoka Season 1 in 2023 ("Part Four: Fallen Jedi", "Part Five: Shadow Warrior", and "Part Seven: Dreams and Madness"), and in the 2026 feature film The Mandalorian and Grogu.

In 2021, Lee appeared as a panelist on Canada Reads, championing Natalie Zina Walschots's novel Hench.^[17] In the same year, Lee's five seasons on Kim's Convenience came to an abrupt end when the two show runners left the project.^[18]

In 2022, he was announced as the host of Fandemonium, a factual series which will profile the internal cultures of various pop culture fandoms.^[19] He also appeared on the 2022 revival of The Kids in the Hall.^[20][21]

In 2024, he played Uncle Iroh in the Netflix live action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender.^[22][23] On March 6, 2024, Netflix announced that the series was renewed for two additional seasons after garnering 21.2 million views in its first four days.^[24][25] He also plays a new main character, Inspector Albert Choi, the new head of Station House No 4, in the eighteenth season of the CBC mystery series Murdoch Mysteries.^[26]