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…
IT'S NOT YOUR AVERAGE WAR DRAMA