Moon Ki-hoon
Choi Min-sik, one of Korea's most decorated screen actors, returns to TV with his first Netflix series Choi Min-sik attends a press conference for the Netflix series "Notes from the Last Row" at Hotel Naru Seoul M Gallery in Seoul on Wednesday. (Netflix) Ask Choi Min-sik to describe his latest lead role and he reaches, bluntly, for the language of self-loathing.The grumpy literature professor he plays in Netflix's "Notes from the Last Row" is "a man who grinds himself down with a complex that borders on self-abuse," he says, "tormenting himself over it."Then came the confession: "I've got plenty of pathetic in me too. The inferiority, the shame you can't show anybody — everyone's felt that at least once."It's a curious thing to hear from an actor who has done about everything there is to do, four decades of being the most intense presence in any frame he appears in. Sitting at a press conference in Seoul on Wednesday morning, alongside director Kim Gyu-tae and his young co-star Choi Hyun-wook, the 64-year-old spent a good deal of it talking himself down.The six-part series casts him as Heo Mun-oh: a literature professor who published one novel twenty years ago and hasn't written a word since. The man is prickly with his students, detesting their poor writing, until he reads something by Lee Kang (Choi Hyun-wook), the quiet kid who always takes the back row of the lecture hall.The writing is good, too good to be true, he figures. Seeing in the boy the talent he never made good on, Heo offers private lessons, gets pulled into Kang's strange, possibly invented stories, and a slow mind-game begins, one where it's never quite clear who's on top. Choi Min-sik stars in "Notes from the Last Row" (Netflix) The series is adapted from Spanish writer Juan Mayorga's play, staged in Seoul a couple of years back. That detail didn't go unnoticed."I heard the pitch over the phone and thought, I know this from somewhere," Choi said. "Turns out there was an original, a play. I asked for the script. I'd been missing something with a whiff of literature to it."For Choi, the instinct runs deeper than memory: Theater is where he comes from. Unbeknownst those who know him from "Oldboy," the actor came up the hard way through the 1980s in Daehangno, Seoul's storied theater district where small troupes worked tiny stages on shoestring budgets. The pay was next to nothing — sometimes 500,000 won ($324) for three months' work, by his own account — but he stuck it out anyway.TV came calling years later, bringing a number of hits: "The Years of Ambition" (1990), which won him best new actor at the KBS Drama Awards, and the 1994 hit "The Moon of Seoul." He drifted for a few years after until the landmark spy blockbuster "Shiri" (1999) put him back on the map, this time as a movie star. It was only in 2022 — by which point he was a screen legend several times over — that he returned to TV, with Disney+'s "Big Bet," playing a Korean fixer running casinos in the Philippines. "Notes" is his first time out with Netflix. Choi Min-sik stars in "Big Bet" (Disney+) So the question is what he's got to offer with this one. There's a particular pleasure in watching Choi's portrayal unfold in whatever world he's been handed, anticipating which face shows up. He has played the loser and the avenger, the drunk and the killer, the lucky fool and the holy terror, sometimes all at once in a single picture.He was the small-time hood in "Failan" (2001), crass and petty on the surface but soft underneath — a man who breaks down reading his dead wife's letter. As the wild painter in Im Kwon-taek's "Chihwaseon" (2002), he was all desire and fury, drinking and brawling and bellowing at once. And there's the iconic Oh Dae-su in "Oldboy" (2003), a man undone by fate after fifteen years in a locked room, fighting down a hallway with a hammer and a knife in his back only to find himself crawling on the floor and begging like a dog by the end. Choi Min-sik stars in "Failan" (Tube Pictures) Choi Min-sik stars in "Oldboy" (Egg Film/CJ ENM) "I Saw the Devil" (2010) sent him to the extreme — pure, unfiltered evil as the serial killer in a brutal cat-and-mouse chase. "Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time" (2012) had him as the slimy customs official who flattered and bluffed his way up the underworld. And in "The Admiral: Roaring Currents" (2014), the most-watched Korean film of all time, he was Adm. Yi Sun-sin — a stoic, tormented presence befitting Korea's most revered historical figure. Choi Min-sik stars in "Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time" (Showbox) Choi Min-sik stars in "The Admiral: Roaring Currents" (Bigstone Pictures/CJ ENM) The actor has never been the one to take the easy route into a part; though in his 60s, he seems to have eased off a bit on the heftier stuff. His recent work leans lighter: the geomancer of the supernatural tentpole "Exhuma" (2024), and the casino kingpin of "Big Bet" (2022), the Disney+ underworld saga — both with their sparks but arguably tamer and flatter than the roles that defined his career.So when Choi calls Heo Mun-oh a small, self-pitying man, one should perhaps take it as the starting line, not the finish. On paper, and going by the teasers, the man comes off as bitter and small, eaten up by his own envy — whether Choi holds him there, or finds the tenderness under it, or lets him tip into something approaching madness, is anyone's guess.At Wednesday's event, Choi seemed intent on handing the credit elsewhere. He circled back again and again to his young co-star Choi Hyun-wook, his on-screen student who he'd asked to watch an audition for the role."Watching Hyun-wook, I wondered — did I have that kind of focus, that kind of eye for detail, back at his age?" Choi said. Actors Choi Min-sik (left) and Choi Hyun-wook attend a press conference for the Netflix series "Notes from the Last Row" in Seoul on Wednesday. (Yonhap) "I've learned how miserable it makes you, measuring yourself against other people. I'm grateful for what I've got. With acting, there's no point sizing yourself up against anyone. People talk about an 'acting showdown,' but actors don't fight. Everyone walks their own road."It remains to be seen whether his Heo Mun-oh ever gets there. The gap between the man and the role is, you can only suspect, the part Choi found worth chasing."Notes from the Last Row" begins Friday on Netflix.
