It’s not TV. It’s Park Chan-wook
THE DIRECTOR ON HOW HIS HBO THRILLER THE SYMPATHIZER WILL UPEND YOUR EXPECTATIONS
WORDS KATIE GOH
The Captain (Hoa Xuande) with one of the four American characters played by Robert Downey Jr;
THERE HAVE BEEN many screen stories about the Vietnam War. But nobody has tackled the conflict quite how Park Chan-wook does with his new espionage-themed TV show, The Sympathizer. Based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the show centres on a half-French, half-Vietnamese Communist spy called the Captain (Hoa Xuande), who travels to the US as a refugee and double agent after Saigon falls in 1975. “Both [Nguyen and I] are Asians and both our countries have been under the control of imperialism,” the South Korean auteur tells Empire. “I felt a great commonality with the novel.” And in true Park fashion, his adaptation is throwing out some major curveballs…