Korean film and television share actors freely — but less freely than chance alone would produce

Korean screen work is often described as two industries — film people and television people — with an occasional crossing that gets remarked on. The join between Netflix’s charts and Wikidata’s cast lists lets us put a number on it.

Of the 701 actors with two or more charting Korean titles, 432 have appeared in both a film and a series. That is 61.6%. Most people who work more than once work across the line.

The number that makes it interesting

61.6% sounds like a wall that barely exists. To know whether it is low or high you need something to compare it against, so we asked what the figure would be if format meant nothing at all — if each of a person’s titles were drawn without regard to whether it was a film or a series.

73.2%. Under that null, 513 of the 701 would have worked in both.

So the wall is real and it is thin: about 81 people who could have crossed, given how many titles they have, did not. Format is doing something. It is not doing very much.

Where the separation actually sits

Series-only outnumber film-only by more than two to one. That is the asymmetry: there is a population that works in television and does not appear in a charting Korean film, and it is twice the size of the population that does the reverse.

And it thins out fast with volume. Among the 195 people with five or more titles, 174 have done both — 12 are film-only and 9 series-only. Work enough and you cross almost regardless.

What would move these numbers

Incomplete cast lists push in one direction only. If a person did four series and two films and Wikidata records only the series, they appear here as a series specialist. Missing credits cannot turn a specialist into a crosser; they can only do the reverse. 61.6% is therefore a floor, and the true crossing rate is higher by an amount we cannot measure.

The null model is a comparison, not a prediction. It assumes a person’s titles are independent draws at film’s overall share of the set. Nobody’s career works that way. It is there to answer “compared to what”, which a bare 61.6% cannot.

And this is only what charted. A film actor whose work never reached a Netflix Top 10, or who works mainly in theatre or advertising, is either absent or looks like something they are not.