EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is based on an interview Daniel Dae Kim conducted with Lee Byung-hun for K-Everything, a CNN Original Series hosted by Kim exploring the global impact of South Korean culture.
Lee Byung-hun’s body was in a hotel in Seoul, but his mind was somewhere over the Pacific.
The actor had been hopping around the planet on promotional duties for about a year — first for “Squid Games,” then global phenomenon “KPop Demon Hunters,” then awards season contender “No Other Choice” — bouncing between South Korea, New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, London, and Venice. He was horribly jetlagged, he confessed to actor Daniel Dae Kim, host of the upcoming CNN Original Series “K-Everything,” late one December evening.
Lee hadn’t followed the advice of industry friends, who’d told him to rest before the publicity push. “I’m having a hard time now,” he said. “But mentally, I’m so happy.”
First-time Golden Globe nominee Lee has practice running on fumes. As a young actor in 1990s South Korea, he’d sometimes be awake for days on sets with a dim view on fixed working hours. (One time, on his third day without rest, Lee was ready for his close-up. “The director called action and … I fell asleep,” he recalled.) The 55-year-old is not about to slow down as he conquers Hollywood for a second time — this time in his own language and on his own terms.
Lee never intended to become an actor. He was a college freshman studying French literature in 1991 when his mother’s friend slipped him an audition flyer as a joke. “People were so much more conservative than now,” he said, and acting “was not a respected profession.” He went and caught the bug.
Lee says his parents were open minded as he booked jobs on TV series (notably student drama “Tomorrow Love”), before he started taking roles in films. His big break came in 2000 with thriller “Joint Security Area.” Lee played a South Korean soldier accused of gunning down North Korean troops in the Demilitarized Zone. Directed by Park Chan-wook, the massive critical and commercial hit paired knotty morals with operatic violence, offering a blueprint for a generation of Korean filmmakers (including Bong Joon Ho and Kim Jee-woon).
In 2005, Lee was at the Cannes Film Festival when an agent offered to crack open the door on Hollywood. He accepted, and four years later Lee made his English-language debut in “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.”
“Acting in English,” he recalled, “felt like I was swimming in the middle of the ocean without knowing the direction.”
“If someone pointed out to me some pronunciation or intonation (or) accent, then it was in my head,” he said. “I’ve gotten a little more comfortable with that. Back then, if someone suddenly pointed something out to me, or if something kept bothering me, I’d be so preoccupied with it that I couldn’t do anything else.”
If he had misgivings, casting directors didn’t. A “G.I. Joe” sequel followed, then roles in “Terminator Genisys” (2015), Antoine Fuqua’s remake of “The Magnificent Seven” (2016) and more.
In the space of a few years, Lee shared the screen with all-time greats Al Pacino, Denzel Washington, Anthony Hopkins, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ethan Hawke. He bought a house in LA and purchased a small winery in Mendoza, Argentina. But Lee never fully committed to Hollywood, continuing to act in Korean hits like “The Age of Shadows” (2016) and “Emergency Declaration” (2021).
He still has his LA home, he said, though “most of the time it’s empty.” This awards season, it might be a different story.
In the past year or so, Lee has experienced a career 180: US audiences came to him.
Last year, the actor brutalized contestants as the Front Man in “Squid Game,” terrorized kids as the voice of Gwi-Ma in “KPop Demon Hunters” and was merciless as a hapless killer in Oscar contender “No Other Choice.”
“Squid Game,” Hwang Dong-hyuk’s bloody satire of late capitalism, launched in 2021 and quickly became Netflix’s most popular show of all time. The streamer logged nearly 600 million views of season one and two ahead of its third and final season last June, which was viewed 60 million times in its first three days (another Netflix record).
“It felt very weird,” Lee said, “because I made Korean content with Korean actors and Korean staff and a Korean director, and it’s about Korean story based on Korean culture in the Korean language — and they react like that?”
He tips his cap to streaming services as an industry gamechanger: “as long as the content is good, then people all around the world will watch it.”
Last June, Netflix also released the animated film “KPop Demon Hunters” (a title that explains the plot). Two months later, it became the streamer’s most popular movie of all time, jumping from living rooms into theaters with over 1,000 sold out singalong screenings around the world, and four songs inside the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. It’s very likely the pop culture sensation — which won two awards at the 2026 Golden Globes for best animated film and best original song, “Golden” — will receive multiple Oscar nominations.
A North American production in partnership with Sony Pictures Animation, the film features a voice cast stacked with members of the Korean diaspora (including Daniel Dae Kim). Lee signed on because he wanted to make a film his kids could watch.
“I watched it with my 10-year-old boy,” he said. “He asked me, ‘Are you the villain?’ I said yes. He said, ‘Again?!’ He was so disappointed.” (His two-year-old daughter hasn’t seen the movie but her favorite song is, of course, “Golden.”)
One film his children won’t be watching any time soon is “No Other Choice.”
Lee’s long-waited reunion with Park Chan-wook premiered at the Venice Film Festival in August and has been navigating the festival circuit and award season machine ever since. It debuted in US cinemas on Christmas Day and enters more theaters on January 16.
Based on American Donald Westlake’s novel “The Ax” — and previously made into French film “Le couperet” by Costas-Gavras in 2005 — Park updates the story of an unemployed middle manager who hatches a plan to kill his competition as he tries to land a new job.
Lee said Park first mentioned the project about 15 years ago. It was planned with an American cast, before Park exported it to Korea and tapped Lee to lead as paper manufacturer Man-su.
“He thought that the story was going to be a very dark and tragic one, because it’s about a man who lost his job, but he found himself bursting out in laughter,” said Park in a recent interview with CNN.
“The first question he asked me after reading the screenplay was whether he read it correctly, and my response to him was, ‘the funnier the better.’”
Man-su is a hilariously terrible and terribly hilarious serial killer. He second-guesses his methods, fails to execute plans and ends up sympathizing with his victims (naturally, they have a lot in common). And yet, despite himself, he gets the job done. Lee is playing against type; his character is hardly villainous, instead a bumbling victim of a cold, uncaring system.
Park insisted to CNN that Man-su is the protagonist and automation is the true villain, dragging Westlake’s story into the present by making AI the ultimate bogeyman.
“Korea is a very competitive society; everyone is trying to survive,” said Lee, though he acknowledged his country’s situation isn’t unique. “With the advent of AI, people will be thinking more deeply about this issue … It’s possible it could get even worse in the future.”
“No Other Choice” — ruthlessly incisive, unpredictable and rooted in cultural specificity — returns to the basic principles underpinning a lot of successful K-content.
Both Lee and Park expressed that South Korea’s turbulent modern history — colonized by Japan from 1910 to 1945, the Korean War and subsequent military dictatorships — has provided the country with a unique energy that has filtered into the arts.
“The great influence that Korean culture has today is truly (a) gain that we’ve gotten through the pain that we’ve experienced in our history. So, I actually feel quite bitter about that,” said the director.
Interestingly, Lee suggested the nation nearly fumbled its hard-won cultural cache, in a creative ebb along the K-wave.
“Twenty years ago, when the Korean wave was just starting in Asia … we started asking ourselves, ‘What will they want next?’” he said of international audiences. “Instead of sticking to what we had always done, we began to think more and more about what they want. And as we did that, over time the enthusiasm gradually cooled off.”
“We’ve already gone through a period of trial and error,” he added, “I think this time we need to create with those lessons in mind.”
The unapologetic, undiluted — and wildly popular — voice of the K-wave today across film, television and music, speaks to a nation doubling down on itself. In 2020, “Parasite” director Bong Joon Ho told the world to get over reading subtitles and won Best Picture at the Oscars a month later. “No Other Choice” and its star, both nominated for Golden Globes and in the conversation for others, is further proof that sometimes the best path to tread is an unwavering one.
“We should continue to develop that same energy, the same method, the same storytelling,” Lee said. “If we stubbornly continue to do what we do, we’ll eventually be able to maintain that ongoing interest.”
The CNN Original Series, K-Everything, hosted by Kim will release on CNN International this April and stream on HBO MAX in May.
