Rising star Choi Hyun-wook on landing first Netflix lead role opposite 'Oldboy' veteran

Choi Hyun-wook may have just taken on his first lead role in an original series on a global streaming platform, but he’s already imagining a biographical picture about his career.

Choi plays Lee Kang, a college student whose talent is discovered by literature professor Heo Mun-oh, in Netflix’s “Notes from the Last Row,” a psychological thriller adapted from a stage play by Spanish playwright Juan Mayorga.

Though he played a lead role in the first season of Wavve’s “Weak Hero” (2022-25) and a supporting role in the second season of Netflix’s hit original series “D.P.” (2021-23), “Notes from the Last Row” carries particular weight in his acting career, Choi says, because he stars opposite of Choi Min-sik, the highly decorated veteran who has appeared in films such as “Oldboy” (2003) and “I Saw the Devil” (2010).

Choi Hyun-wook said that he was at times starstruck by the other man, having grown up watching him on screen. But once filming began, he tried to see him not as Choi Min-sik but as Mun-oh.

“I had admired [Choi Min-sik] since I was young, but on set, I tried to approach him as his character,” Choi Hyun-wook said in a roundtable interview in Seoul on Thursday, following the show’s release on June 26. “I never once thought that I would be on equal footing with him, so I just tried to do my best in the role that I had been given.”

Still, he said that working with Choi Min-sik was a lesson in itself. To properly convince himself that the veteran actor was simply Mun-oh, Choi Hyun-wook realized that he would have to lose himself in Kang first.

In the series, the engineering student first draws the professor’s attention with stories built around his voyeuristic observations of others, then pushes the older man into committing increasingly questionable acts.

“I had to go a little crazy,” Choi Hyun-wook said. “Then Mun-oh, watching Kang, would think, ‘This kid is really strange,’ [and get drawn in].”

That dynamic surfaced in one ad-libbed moment, when Kang asks Mun-oh, who has been pushing him to take private writing lessons, “Do you like me?”

In an earlier roundtable interview, the older Choi said that the line made him laugh and jokingly reply, “You’re not my type,” while still in character.

“[Choi Hyun-wook] says these strange things, but you grow fond of him,” he said. “That’s what chemistry is.”

The two, in separate interviews, had nothing but praise for the other. For the younger Choi, one moment that stayed with him in particular occurred in the last episode, when Mun-oh appears emotionally broken.

“As a junior actor, it was truly astonishing [to witness Choi Min-sik’s performance],” he said. “In the final scene of episode six, he overwhelms the bust shot with only his collapsed, timeworn face. I thought to myself that this is what a legendary actor looks like.”

Related Article

• Choi Min-sik empathizes with ‘pathetic’ character in ‘Notes from the Last Row’

• Choi Min-sik takes on a thriller with 'literary heft' in Netflix's 'Notes from the Last Row'

Their chemistry continued off set, where the older actor, who debuted in 1981, advised his co-star to see and experience as much as possible.

“[He] told me to attend musicals, travel and try different things,” Choi Hyun-wook said. “He said that those experiences would add more colors to my acting and make it richer.”

The younger Choi, who was born 21 years after his older counterpart began his career, has taken those words to heart. He recently visited Copenhagen, which he loved, and said that he would like to go to Switzerland next.

He also plans to apply Choi Min-sik’s advice to his acting soon.

“There are still so many genres that I haven’t tried and so much more road ahead of me than behind me,” he said. “Rather than wanting to play a specific role or scene, I really want to experience as many different opportunities as possible.”

One agenda on his bucket list is to make a movie like “Wish” (2009), actor Jung Woo’s semiautobiographical film about his school days. For Choi Hyun-wook, his own movie would likely begin with baseball, which he played from fourth grade until his first year of high school, the training of which he described as “painful.”

As for Thursday’s interview, he said that he would place it somewhere near the end of the film, perhaps as part of a montage.

“I haven’t thought about what the climax would be,” Choi Hyun-wook said. “But I think that the story would focus more on who I was before becoming an actor, moment by moment. After I become an actor — maybe that would be season two.”

BY KIM JU-YEON [[email protected]]