Song Kang-ho plays Samsik in the Korean drama Uncle Samsik. The multiple award-winning actor plays a mysterious power broker and fixer during Korea’s turbulent post war years. Song’s 30-year film career includes dozens of films, among them Parasite, Snowpiercer, The Attorney, A Taxi Driver, Broker and Memories of Murder, but he’s never acted in a TV drama before. Not until Uncle Samsik. Song’s fans might be surprised by this choice. He’s not.
“I think it was very natural for me because there were a lot of changes in the production environment, especially since the global pandemic,” said Song. “There has been so much change, and now we have so many more channels to communicate with the viewers, the fans, and the audience, not just through theater and movies, but there are a lot of different channels. Now, it may be a little bit more complex for the actors, but I think it’s just natural that we want to use all of these different channels to communicate with our fans and the audience.”
The historical television series, which also stars Byun Yo-han, Lee Kyu-hyung, Jin Ki-joo, and Seo Hyun-woo, premiered internationally on Disney+ in April and in the U.S. on Hulu in May. The series was written and directed by Shin Yeon-shick and it’s not the first time Song and Shin have collaborated.
“I can actually say that this is my first collaboration with director Shin that I’ll be showing to the audience,” said Song. “There is this other film that I worked on together with him. He was the director for this movie called One Win, which is a small budget sports film, but it hasn’t been released yet. We did collaborate on the film Cobweb before, but that was directed by someone else, and director Shin was actually the writer for the film. So as a director and actor, this is the first collaboration that you’re going to see.”
Uncle Samsik is set during the early 60s, a tumultuous time in Korean history.
“At the time, it was just after the Korean War,” said Song. “It hadn’t even been 10 years since the Korean War. Everything was pretty much in remnants and nothing was set in stone. The politics, the social aspects, the culture, everything was very complex and nothing was really stable. Everyone was dreaming of a new world and they had to build it from bottom up. That led to a lot of clashes within the society and it was a very turbulent era.”
Uncle Samsik, whose name means “three meals a day,” is a product of an era when few people could afford to eat three meals a day. The character learned to be a power broker out of the desire to survive and he genuinely wants to help people, but he’s not above hurting them. He’s sometimes beneficent and sometimes cruel. He feeds people, yet he might also commit murder. Even though such complexity makes the character seem real, Samsik is not based on anyone in particular.
This story was originally published on forbes.com.