The Snapshot
In The Greatest Hits Justin H. Min is David Park, a grieving antique shop owner who meets and falls in love with Harriet (Lucy Boynton) at a support group meeting. Harriet is mourning the sudden loss of her boyfriend, killed in a car accident. What David doesn’t know, but soon learns, is that Harriet can use music to travel through time.
(The Hulu original film was released on the platform on April 12, and is currently streaming)
The Performance
True leading men are hard to come by. Especially when they don’t look like everyone else. Sure, there’s that classic American handsome fella who becomes a big-time movie star, but we’re living in a different age when leading men can come in all different shapes, sizes, sexual orientations and ethnic backgrounds.
Stephen Yeun is a perfect example of this. The Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning star of Minari (for which he got that Oscar nod) and Beef (for which he won that Emmy), is a Korean-American actor who can carry a movie all by himself.
Rising to a similar status is Yeun’s Beef co-star, and fellow Korean-American actor, Justin H. Min.
If you’re looking for some kind of proof, look no further than a pair of films released over the past nine months. The first was in Ant-Man and Fresh Off the Boat star Randall Park’s directorial debut, Shortcomings, in which Min played Ben, a down-on-his-luck indie filmmaker trying to figure out his life, making a series of bad decisions and alienating just about everyone around him along the way. Reading that description might turn you off from checking it out, but of course, it’s much more complicated than that.
The reason? Min.
In lesser hands, Ben would have come off as annoying, someone with whom we don’t want to spend a minute, much less 92 of them in a single sitting. However, Min brings charm and empathy to Ben. Rather than being disgusted by his often self-destructive and even obnoxious behavior, we identify with him because we know that we have either been there ourselves or know that we could have been.
Min is so eminently watchable, that you find yourself rooting for Ben, even when you know that he can’t get out of his own way.

The Greatest Hits is a decidedly different animal, both in tone and in performance.
In this story, Harriet is the lead, and David is the romantic interest. Still, though, while Min doesn’t have nearly the same amount of screen time as he did in Shortcomings, he makes the most of it, employing charm, humor and grief in equal measure, even as he slowly finds himself falling for the reluctant Harriet. When she tells him her secret, that she can travel through time when she hears particular songs, taking her back to moments in her life when those songs were also playing, his reaction is genuine and feels natural.
As natural as one imagines it might be, at least, if something ever were to admit something so outlandish to us.
Rather than dismissing it outright, or perhaps buying in as one would in a film of lesser quality, David is skeptical, but he likes this woman and wants to believe her. In Min’s hands, the moment lingers in the viewer’s mind because of the way he plays it.
For example, when he learns that Harriet is telling the truth and asks him what she should do to save the love of her life and, in the process, almost certainly lose David as well, Ben tells her what she needs to hear. Playing the moment, Min makes it count. The weight of it comes across in a way that only an actor of great skill can deliver.
That’s Min, in a nutshell. An actor whose star is rising. Rapidly.
The Career
Anyone who is a fan of good science fiction is familiar with Min, who has starred for three seasons on Netflix’s hit comic book adaptation The Umbrella Academy, with the fourth and final season on its way later this year.
For those who aren’t, there have been a few other quality opportunities to see Min at work, the biggest one probably being the aforementioned Beef, which won a ton of Emmys earlier this year and caught lightning in a bottle in how it was received. Yeun and co-lead Ali Wong garnered most of the kudos, but it’s impossible to have been a part of that cast and not get some of the reflected glow.
All that was in just five episodes of the 10 that aired in the show’s first season (it was so popular that the show intended as a limited series was renewed, and now will become an anthology, with a brand new cast in each successive season). Setting aside The Umbrella Academy — in which he was just a part of a large ensemble centered around Elliot Page — Min’s career had been one made up of small but often flashy supporting roles. Perhaps the biggest one was the titular malfunctioning AI in the 2022 science fiction movie After Yang, starring Colin Ferrell.
But Min’s career has changed drastically over the past year, as Park’s casting of him as Ben in Shortcomings shows. Suddenly, this 34-year-old actor whose career was solid if unspectacular is getting his shot.
Judging by what we’ve seen from just these two examples, he’s taking it.
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