The Squid Game actor O Yeong-su has been charged with sexual misconduct, South Korea’s prosecutor said. The 78-year-old in January became the first South Korean to win a Golden Globe award for best supporting actor in a series for his performance as a seemingly vulnerable old man in the mega-hit Netflix dystopian thriller. According to local reports, the South Korean prosecution indicted him without detention on Thursday for allegedly improperly touching a woman’s body in 2017. He has denied the allegation, local media report. Everything reported by local media on O “is not factually incorrect”, an official from the Suwon district prosecutor’s office told AFP, without giving further details. After the news, local reports said Seoul’s culture ministry decided to stop airing a government commercial – about its regulatory innovation – featuring O. Squid Game, which imagines a macabre world where marginalised people are pitted against one another in traditional children’s games that turn deadly, became Netflix’s most popular series launch, attracting an audience of 111 million in less than four weeks after its debut in 2021. It is still one of the most popular shows on the platform. The show’s success has amplified South Korea’s increasingly outsized influence on global popular culture, following global fame won by the likes of K-pop band BTS and the Oscar-winning film Parasite.