Cobra Kai Season 6: Why Master Kim Sun-Yung Looks So Familiar

Contains spoilers for "Cobra Kai" Season 6, Episode 2 — "The Prize"

When audiences meet Master Kim Sun-Yung (Don Lee) in John Kreese's (Martin Kove, Barrett Carnahan) "Cobra Kai" Season 5 flashbacks, it seems pretty obvious that he's already long dead in the show's present day. After all, he trained Kreese's superior officer George Turner during the Korean War of the early 1950s — roughly seven decades before the events of "Cobra Kai." Imagine Kreese's surprise, then, when he finds out that Master Kim is still very much around.

"Cobra Kai" Season 6, Episode 2, "The Prize," provides the first close look at the elusive but much-mentioned Tang Soo Do master whose ruthless training is behind most major antagonists in the franchise. For this purpose, the role has been recast with a very familiar actor taking over the character.

While Master Kim's long hair and beard might disguise him somewhat, he is now played by C.S. Lee, who deftly infuses the part with appropriate intensity and gravitas. Lee joins "Cobra Kai" with plenty of experience working on major TV productions, and you might very well have seen him in one or more of his previous roles.

While C.S. Lee has been appearing in TV shows and movies since 1998, his big breakthrough role is exceptionally easy to pinpoint. From 2006 to 2013, he starred as Vince Masuka, a major character on Showtime's serial killer drama "Dexter."

It's hard to be the creepiest forensics expert in the Miami Metro Police Department when your crime lab partner is an actual serial killer, but Lee's Masuka certainly does his level best. Where Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) aspires to appear normal while committing murders all around the place, Masuka is openly comical and inappropriate. However, his penchant for strange comments and constant inability to read the room hide what just might be the brightest forensic mind in the entire series.

In a 2007 interview with The Seattle Times, Lee enjoyed the opportunity to play a truly obnoxious character like Masuka, but also expressed a belief that the forensic specialist may just be using his jarring behavior as a coping mechanism. "My interpretation is that that's how he deals with all the gruesomeness," Lee said. "From what I've gathered Masuka's probably weirder than Dexter."

Shortly after starting his successful tenure on "Dexter," C.S. Lee further increased his visibility with a memorable turn as Harry Tang on "Chuck." The NBC spy comedy-drama focuses on mild-mannered, nerdy Chuck Bartowski (Zachary Levi), who accidentally becomes a living CIA-NSA database and gets drawn into the seedy world of espionage. However, he still has to maintain his old life, which divides the cast of "Chuck" between the characters in his mundane everyday existence and the ones he's forced to interact with to solve difficult and dangerous cases.

As Chuck's confrontational senior colleague at Buy More, Harry is firmly in the former category. His annoying behavior provides much of the contrast between the humdrum difficulties the main character faces in his daily life and the highly dangerous problems he faces in his new spy gig.

Harry only appears in seven episodes of the show's Season 1 before his arc comes to an end. Still, the comically serious character is an instrumental part of "Chuck's" formative episodes — and just as importantly, the role allows Lee to show a very different side of his skills than "Dexter's" Vince Masuka.

CBS police procedural "East New York" was inspired by real-life events that transpired in Rockford, Illinois, but instead of the run-of-the-mill criminal investigation approach on the subject, the show explores community policing in the titular neighborhood.

"East New York" features an all-star cast that includes names like Amanda Warren, Jimmy Smits, Kevin Rankin, and Richard Kind, and focuses on a precinct that puts a number of officers who voluntarily live in a housing project where they work. Apart from solving and preventing crimes, the aim is to look into the effect this approach has on the community, as well as the effect the community can have on the police.

C.S. Lee plays prominent recurring character Sergeant Jimmy Kee in the show, appearing in 10 of "East New York's" 21 episodes. The series unfortunately didn't make it past its first season, but was nevertheless well-received by the critics and gave the audiences a chance to see yet another side of Lee's abilities as an actor.

The Apple TV+ sci-fi drama "For All Mankind's" alternate timeline features a combination of reimagined historical figures and characters created specifically for the show who are locked in a never-ending, decades-spanning space race between nations. One of the big goals for the various countries is, quite understandably, colonizing Mars, and few characters — or viewers, for that matter — could have guessed that North Korea ends up being the first nation with a man on the red planet.

C.S. Lee plays said man, Lee Jung-Gil, who secretly lands on Mars in early 1995 with Park Chol (Jason Her), who doesn't survive. Lee spends months stranded on the planet, carrying out his mission and slowly growing more and more desperate until he comes across astronauts from NASA's Happy Valley Mars base. While Lee goes on to become a major character in the show's Season 4, his grand debut in Season 3, which details his toil and trouble on Mars, is particularly impressive.

"We had a lot of fun shooting that opening sequence with C.S. Lee," co-creator Matt Wolpert told CBR. "It's really like a little short film more than anything, just getting to spend time with him. I think it's one of my favorite parts of the season."

Since C.S. Lee has turned up in an impressive number of TV shows and movies over the years, it's entirely possible that "Cobra Kai" fans may have caught him in a number of different roles before his turn as Master Kim Sun-Yung. Perhaps you've seen him in one of the no less than six different one-episode roles he's played on "Law & Order" and "Law & Order: Criminal Intent." He's also turned up as Dr. Ba on HBO's "Sopranos" and had a four-episode role as Richard Geldof in "True Detective" Season 2.

Lee's also played other recurring characters like Jae Shin on "Power," Joseph Lee on "Sneaky Pete," and Bernard Kim on "Chicago Med," while also collecting an impressive arsenal of guest star gigs in shows like "The Rookie," "Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens," and Netflix's live-action "Avatar: The Last Airbender." He's also had roles in movies like "The Stepford Wives," "The Unborn," "Altered Minds," and "Innocent Blood." "Cobra Kai" is a neat addition to his ever-expanding CV and further proof that Lee is an actor that fans want to keep their eye on.