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Anupam Tripathi

Overview

Anupam Tripathi is an Indian actor based in South Korea who has built a career in Korean film and television. He is best known internationally for his role as Ali Abdul, a Pakistani migrant worker, in the Netflix survival drama Squid Game (2021), a performance that brought him widespread recognition and a global audience.

Key facts

Name Anupam Tripathi
Nationality Indian
Country of work South Korea
Profession Actor
Education Korea National University of Arts (School of Drama)
Notable role Ali Abdul in Squid Game
Languages used in performance Korean, English, Hindi/Urdu

Background

Tripathi was born and raised in Delhi, India. He developed an interest in performance during his school years and pursued formal training in theatre. He moved to South Korea on a scholarship to study acting at the Korea National University of Arts (K-Arts) in Seoul, one of the country's leading institutions for the performing arts. While studying, he also began learning the Korean language, which became central to his subsequent career on Korean screens.

Career

Early work in Korea

After completing his studies, Tripathi worked steadily in supporting roles in Korean cinema and television, often cast as a South or Central Asian character. His early appearances included small parts in films and dramas where he played foreign workers, students, and other migrant figures, reflecting a niche that few actors in the Korean industry could fill at the time.

Squid Game and international recognition

In 2021, Tripathi appeared in Squid Game, the Korean-language Netflix series created by Hwang Dong-hyuk. He played Ali Abdul, a Pakistani factory worker who enters the deadly contest to support his family. The character became one of the most discussed in the series, and Tripathi's performance was widely praised by critics and viewers around the world. Squid Game went on to become one of Netflix's most-watched original productions, and the cast received the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series.

Subsequent work

Following Squid Game, Tripathi continued to take on roles in Korean productions and expanded into international projects. He has spoken publicly in interviews about being one of the few Indian actors working full-time in the Korean entertainment industry and about the limited but expanding range of roles offered to South Asian performers in Korea.

Significance

Tripathi is among the most visible Indian actors working in the South Korean film and television industry. His success in Squid Game drew attention to the small community of foreign actors based in Korea and highlighted the increasing global reach of Korean-language content following the international breakthroughs of films and series such as Parasite and Kingdom. For Indian audiences, his career represents an unusual cross-cultural trajectory from Delhi theatre training to a leading institution in Seoul and onward to a Netflix global hit.

References