In Squid Sport, lead character Seong Gi-hun is a down-on-his-luck playing addict given a harmful alternative to win a fortune and switch his life round by taking part in lethal kids’s video games in opposition to 456 different cash-strapped no-hopers. Lee Jung-jae, who performs Seong, has nearly nothing in widespread along with his alter-ego: he’s one among South Korea’s largest stars by means of movies akin to Ship Us from Evil and the Together with the Gods franchise and exhibits Chief of Employees and Triple.
He’s humble about his alternative after the present’s surprising world success and the glut of awards nominations he garnered afterward (together with turning into the primary male TV performer to earn a Display Actors Guild Award nomination for a completely non-English language position). “I nonetheless don’t really feel like my life has modified dramatically,” he says. “However I do sit up for having extra alternatives to work with nice folks on extra initiatives.”
Lee had no illustration within the U.S. when Squid Sport broke by means of, creating the scenario the place an in a single day Netflix star emerged with out a direct line into Hollywood. That quickly modified when he signed with CAA in February. “After a number of conferences, I got here to the conclusion that we could possibly be good companions,” he says. “I’m already getting a whole lot of help from them. I’m actually grateful.”
Lee now has the toolkit to copy his large Korean success within the U.S. and he believes the best way audiences interpret tales as of late provides him a good higher probability to make an impression. “We now dwell in an period the place the power to precise feelings is extra necessary for an actor than the linguistic expertise,” he says. “I’m not fluent in English, however I don’t assume it should forestall me from speaking the feelings of my characters.”
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Lee shall be on the Cannes Movie Competition at a Midnight Screening along with his directorial debut Hunt, during which he stars reverse shut pal Jung Woo-sung as a Nationwide Safety Company operative. Whereas the movie, which he’s additionally writing and producing, is a spy thriller with a Eighties-set storyline addressing the paranoia and concern behind the decades-old battle between North Korea and South Korea, it truly facilities on themes of “stopping battle and violence,” he says.
“The themes will be quite severe, however I did my finest to make the movie as entertaining as doable. The organizers of the Cannes Movie Competition took a good view of the intentions behind the movie and the weather of leisure it brings. I’m honored to have the ability to have my directorial debut screened on the competition, and I sit up for the dialog with the viewers after the premiere.”
Trying past the French Riviera, Lee sees a brilliant future for Korean content material. He notes that the central themes of Squid Sport—akin to class, monetary woes and overcoming loopy odds—resonated world wide and proved how tales from the nation can drive the worldwide dialog. “There’s a whole lot of Korean content material that’s simply as entertaining as Squid Sport, so I’m assured we’ll see extra hits prefer it,” he says. “There are various sequence and movies at the moment in manufacturing throughout all kinds of genres that haven’t been tried earlier than. These sequence and movies will transfer and entertain audiences in lots of different nations.”
If Lee is correct, Ok-pop quickly gained’t be the one Korean leisure export driving tastes within the West.
