Korean star Lee Byung-hun has talked about the encouragement that Korean filmmakers and actors get from the overwhelmingly positive response to Korean films and shows. Lee, who has strongly solidified himself as an actor of note in films such as A Bittersweet Life, I Saw the Devil, Joint Security Area, The Good, The Bad and The Weird, and the hit Netflix series Squid Game, says the reach of Korean stories globally makes him proud.
In an interview with PTI, Lee said the "surprising" global success of Korean filmmakers' work encourages them to "create even greater content" with exceptional quality. "I hope that everyone in the industry not only feels great pride in everything that we have achieved. Hopefully, we can push ourselves even further to be more creative and bring out better stories."
In the first season of Squid Game, Lee was revealed to be the actor playing a mysterious figure named Front Man, who disguised himself in a mask and outfit for a major part of the season until the third act where his identity is unmasked. The Front Man is revealed to have his own backstory tied to the disturbingly perilous games around which the key events of the principal characters revolved.
Lee shared that, after the completion of the first season, he and series creator and director Hwang Dong-hyuk had discussed taking the story of the 'Front Man' aka Hwang In-ho forward if they ever got to make another season, to give viewers a sense of what happened to him in the past and what led him to become one of the key members of a shady organisation.
"Both of us knew at the time that In-ho would be one of the main characters. And based on that I knew it was going to be great. But when I got the complete script, I was quite in shock because the Front Man story was not just about his past but also about his present. And I was very excited about telling this story (in season two)," he said.
The story, he says, is primarily about the "showdown" between the protagonist Gi-hun (played by Lee Jung-jae) and In-ho. "They went through the same experience that was extremely cruel and brutal but how did they come out of it with such different beliefs? As I thought about it, I realised that there must be a very thin line in what differentiates people's set of beliefs. They may, at times, come from the same series of events (but be different). That duality and complexity of the character was something that I constantly kept in mind as I portrayed the character throughout the second season."
Meanwhile, Lee has completed filming for his next feature No Other Choice, directed by Park Chan-wook, the acclaimed Korean director behind films such as Oldboy, The Handmaiden, and Decision to Leave. Based on the thriller novel The Ax by Donald Westlake, the film follows a man who desperately seeks a new job after getting fired from a long-held position.
