The 44-year-old has become a face viewers overseas would surely recognise from Netflix’s ever-expanding Korean roster. Photos: Handout
“I only heard about it this morning,” Park Hae-soo (pic) said. “They briefed me right before this interview. It still hasn’t quite sunk in.”
Seated in a cafe in Seoul, Park is processing the news that his latest film, The Great Flood, has rocketed to the top of Netflix’s global charts –No.1 in over 50 countries – within days of its Dec 19 release.
The news landed just hours ago, relayed by a staffer during a pre-interview meeting.
Park pauses, almost bashful.
“I’m just grateful. Grateful that this kind of experiment actually exists out there,” he said.
For most actors, this would be a novel sensation.
For Park, it’s closer to deja vu.
The 44-year-old has become a face viewers overseas would surely recognise from Netflix’s ever-expanding Korean roster.
Who can forget his turn as Sang-woo in Squid Game.
That 2021 breakout practically handed him a golden ticket to the streaming giant’s pipeline.
Since then, he’s starred in Narco-Saints and Money Heist: Korea, among others, and most recently played a dogged prosecutor in the drama The Price Of Confession.
Park, in short, is an unprecedented product of an unprecedented era, when a Korean actor can beam directly into living rooms from Sao Paulo to Stockholm without setting a foot outside South Korea.
Speaking in a measured, quiet voice, he downplays the Netflix poster boy label.
“Actors are in a position to be chosen,” he said. “It’s not up to me. I just show up when they call.”
But even for Park, The Great Flood is a curious case, one that’s topping charts despite, or perhaps because of, the sheer bewilderment it has provoked.
Director Kim Byung-woo’s Netflix original opens as garden-variety disaster spectacle: Seoul drowning under biblical floods, young mother An-na (Kim Da-mi) clawing her way up a sinking high-rise with her adorable but often-times maddening son Ja-in (Kwon Eun-seong) in tow.
The first 40 minutes of waterlogged mayhem are sufficiently watchable, if not totally gripping, checking the boxes in a perfunctory, almost algorithmic sort of way.
It would have been just another forgettable streaming disaster flick had the narrative not veered, midway through, into something stranger altogether – a dizzying sci-fi puzzle involving time loops, recursive simulations and some high-concept business about the fate of humanity.
Stolid and steely as usual, Park plays a security operative dispatched to save An-na from the flooded building.
He’s a purely functional presence at most – delivering flat exposition, providing a counterweight to An-na’s maternal desperation – before more or less fading from view.
Asked if he’s aware of the mixed reception, Park takes it in stride.
“I expected the response would vary,” he said. “But I didn’t expect it to be this divided. It stings a bit, honestly. But people are just different. They bring different things to it.”
Park started out in musical theatre in the mid-2000s, collecting stage credits and bit parts for nearly a decade before television gave him traction – most notably 2017’s Prison Playbook, one of the highest-rated Korean cable dramas ever.
Two years later, having branched out to film in earnest, he won best new actor at the Blue Dragon Film Awards.
But Squid Game was what blew the doors open, catapulting him from working actor to streaming-era star.
The wave that got him here isn’t exactly celebrated across the industry.
As streaming platforms muscle in, producers complain they can’t get back-end profits; exhibitors blame streamers for killing box office takings, a particularly sore point in Korea, where theatre attendance still lags far behind pre-pandemic levels.
There’s a quiet wariness, rarely voiced publicly, that the company has upended a decades-old ecosystem.
Park chose his words carefully here.
“Netflix is a tremendous window for Korean content to reach the world. You can’t deny that,” he said.
“But I also think it doesn’t have to be zero-sum. There’s room for collaboration – for the industry and the platform to build something together, sustainably.”
When it comes to his own choices, though, he doesn’t equivocate. “I don’t pick projects based on where they’ll land or what kind of reach they’ll get,” he said.
“I’m not that shallow, and I’m not trying to game anything. I just follow what moves my heart.” – The Korea Herald/Asia News Network
