The dystopian TV drama made the South Korean actor go global and won him an Emmy. Now he’s written and directed his own espionage action thriller
The night before we meet in a central London hotel suite, Lee Jung-jae sat on a stage at a West End cinema, apologising profusely to the assembled audience. At a star-studded opening gala of the London East Asian film festival, Lee’s latest project, Hunt – an action-packed, OTT political conspiracy thriller set in 1980s Korea – had just been screened. But while the crowd whooped and cheered this hero of both the Korean small and silver screen, Lee had something else on his mind. “There is one important subtitle that is slightly wrong in the film,” he lamented, via an interpreter. “It read ‘keep my eyes on you’, when it should have been ‘watch over you’. The meaning was the same, but the nuance wasn’t quite right. And I’m truly sorry.”
Needless to say, amid the stream of explosions, shootouts and mysterious murders – a full-throttle two hours of twist and turns – few would have noticed this small subtitling snafu. So it’s testament to the weight of responsibility Lee feels in releasing Hunt, a film he has written, directed and starred in, that he opted to raise it immediately. Despite 30 years of industry experience in South Korea, where he is one of the country’s most recognised actors, Lee is making his directorial debut with Hunt. And with his lead role in Netflix’s smash-hit series Squid Game having catapulted the 49-year-old to global stardom, the world’s eyes are on him.
