SEOUL \u2013 \u201cI heard about it only this morning,\u201d Park Hae-soo says. \u201cThey briefed me right before this interview. It still hasn\u2019t quite sunk in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Seated in a Samcheong-dong cafe recently, the South Korean actor is processing the news that his latest film, The Great Flood, has rocketed to the top of Netflix\u2019s global charts \u2013 No. 1 in more than 50 countries \u2013 within days of its Dec 19 release.<\/p>\n
He pauses, almost bashful. \u201cI\u2019m just grateful that this kind of experiment actually exists out there,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
For most actors, this would be a novel sensation. For Park, it is closer to deja vu. The 44-year-old has become a face that viewers overseas would recognise from Netflix\u2019s ever-expanding Korean roster.<\/p>\n
You do not forget his Sang-woo in Squid Game (2021 to 2025) \u2013 the sharp-jawed finance bro who had it all before finding himself neck-deep in the rot. His exasperated outburst at Lee Jung-jae\u2019s Gi-hun \u2013 \u201cHa, come on! Gi-hun!\u201d \u2013 was memed to death.<\/p>\n
That 2021 breakout practically handed him a golden ticket to the streaming giant\u2019s pipeline. Since then, he has starred in Narco-Saints (2022) and Money Heist: Korea (2022), among others, and most recently played a dogged prosecutor in the drama The Price Of Confession.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cActors are in a position to be chosen,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s not up to me. I just show up when they call.\u201d<\/p>\n
But even for him, The Great Flood is a curious case, one that is topping charts despite, or perhaps because of, the sheer bewilderment it has provoked.<\/p>\n
Director Kim Byung-woo\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n
It would have been just another forgettable streaming disaster flick had the narrative not veered, midway through, into something stranger altogether \u2013 a dizzying sci-fi puzzle involving time loops, recursive simulations and some high-concept business about the fate of humanity.<\/p>\n
Stolid and steely as usual, Park plays a security operative dispatched to save An-na from the flooded building. He is a purely functional presence at most \u2013 delivering flat exposition, providing a counterweight to An-na\u2019s maternal desperation \u2013 before more or less fading from view.<\/p>\n
Asked if he was aware of the mixed reception, he takes it in his stride.<\/p>\n
\u201cI expected the response would vary,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I didn\u2019t expect it to be this divided. It stings a bit, honestly. But people are just different. They bring different things to it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The screenplay, he recalls, read like nothing he had encountered before. No scene headings, just numbers and cryptic sequences that left him unsure whether he had moved on to a new scene or was still in the same one. It took a couple of reads before the structure clicked, but that initial disorientation, he says, mirrored what audiences would eventually feel.<\/p>\n
For Park, the film\u2019s merit lies precisely in that audacity \u2013 the willingness to confound expectations rather than cater to them.<\/p>\n
\u201cI keep coming back to this word: challenge,\u201d he says. \u201cIt matters that films like this exist, even if they split the room. Because if creators are too scared to take risks, the next generation learns to play it safe. And then we all lose.<\/p>\n
\u201cKorea has so many talented actors, people who can shift between tragedy and comedy, who have these expressive, versatile faces. If we pair that with bolder genre experiments, we\u2019ve got something to put on the world stage. That\u2019s the kind of opportunity global streaming opens up.\u201d<\/p>\n
Park has seen up close what that star-making apparatus can do. If fame is something that finds you while you are grinding on the margins, then he has paid his fair share of dues.<\/p>\n
He started out in musical theatre in the mid-2000s, collecting stage credits and bit parts for nearly a decade before television gave him traction \u2013 most notably 2017\u2019s Prison Playbook, one of the highest-rated South Korean cable dramas ever.<\/p>\n
Two years later, having branched out to film in earnest, he won best new actor at the Blue Dragon Film Awards for crime flick By Quantum Physics: A Nightlife Venture.<\/p>\n
But Squid Game was what blew the doors open, catapulting him from working actor to streaming-era star.<\/p>\n
The wave that got him here is not exactly celebrated across the industry. As streaming platforms muscle in, producers complain they cannot get back-end profits; exhibitors blame streamers for killing box-office takings, a particularly sore point in South Korea, where theatre attendance still lags far behind pre-pandemic levels. <\/p>\n
There is a quiet wariness, rarely voiced publicly, that the company has upended a decades-old ecosystem.<\/p>\n
Park chooses his words carefully here.<\/p>\n
\u201cNetflix is a tremendous window for Korean content to reach the world. You can\u2019t deny that,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I also think it doesn\u2019t have to be zero-sum. There\u2019s room for collaboration \u2013 for the industry and the platform to build something together, sustainably.\u201d<\/p>\n
When it comes to his own choices, though, he does not equivocate. \u201cI don\u2019t pick projects based on where they\u2019ll land or what kind of reach they\u2019ll get. I\u2019m not that shallow, and I\u2019m not trying to game anything. I just follow what moves my heart.\u201d<\/p>\n
So what is it that moves Park\u2019s heart? One thing, for certain, is theatre.<\/p>\n
The stage is where he started out, and live performance remains his abiding passion. Even amid a packed schedule of TV and film engagements, he has managed to keep one foot on the boards. In 2024, he starred alongside Jeon Do-yeon in Simon Stone\u2019s acclaimed adaptation of Chekhov\u2019s The Cherry Orchard, reimagined as a story of a crumbling chaebol family in contemporary Seoul.<\/p>\n
Now the production is going global. Park performed the show in Hong Kong and Singapore in 2025, and runs in Australia and New York are slated for 2026. He visibly lights up discussing the experience of performing in Korean before audiences who do not speak the language.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat surprised me was that a lot of them stopped reading the subtitles partway through,\u201d he says. \u201cThey\u2019d glance at the screen once, get the gist, and then just watch us. Watch how we lived in those moments. Because at some point, it stops being about the words.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a way, it echoes what streaming has done for Korean stories in recent years, carrying them to corners of the world that once seemed impossibly distant. <\/p>\n
But theatre, for Park, seems to offer something the algorithm-fuelled machinery cannot quite replicate. The kind of intimacy and immediacy no screen can hold, yet somehow crosses borders all the same.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I go abroad and watch a play in a language I don\u2019t understand, I already know the rough shape of the story,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s the magic of theatre \u2013 it doesn\u2019t need translation.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou just watch the actors, and you feel it. And then the story reveals itself.\u201d THE KOREA HERALD\/ASIA NEWS NETWORK<\/p>\n
The Great Flood is available on Netflix.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SEOUL \u2013 \u201cI heard about it only this morning,\u201d Park Hae-soo says. \u201cThey briefed me right before this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":212735,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[458,146,85,46],"class_list":{"0":"post-212734","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-il","11":"tag-israel"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=212734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212734\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/212735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=212734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=212734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=212734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}