Interview: Yoo Hae-jin and weight of familiar faces

Yoo Hae-jin sits at a cafe in Samcheong-dong, Seoul, his face settling into the thoughtful creases familiar to Korean audiences.

"I just hope it goes well," he tells a group of reporters of his new film "Yadang: The Snitch." "Though when the weather's this nice, people might skip theaters altogether."

This self-effacing wit typifies Yoo, who, at 55, has transcended mere ubiquity to become something of Korean cinema's connective tissue. Since his film debut in 1997, he has amassed a filmography of dizzying breadth: Nearly 80 roles spanning gritty crime thrillers to comedies and historical epics, his presence defined by wry humor and down-to-earth charm.

Fresh off his turn in last year’s occult blockbuster "Exhuma," Yoo now plays Koo Kwan-hee, a power-hungry prosecutor, in "Yadang: The Snitch." It is a role that at once taps into and strains against the actor's established screen persona.

"Yadang" follows Lee Kang-su (Kang Ha-neul), a wrongfully convicted man recruited by Yoo's ambitious prosecutor to infiltrate Korea's drug underworld as a kind of double agent. Their alliance frays when Koo's larger political aspirations collide with Detective Oh Sang-jae's (Park Hae-joon) relentless antidrug crusade.

"I heard that I didn't come across as the typical prosecutor portrayed in many Korean movies," Yoo says. "Just because someone is ambitious doesn't mean they dramatically flaunt it." To add depth, Yoo proposed a backstory absent from the original script -- a detail about the character's mother repeatedly telling him he must succeed.

Yoo speaks with surprising candor when he addresses the challenge of escaping caricature. "My roles often overlap," he admits. "When I saw the trailer for 'Yadang,' some lines reminded me of my character in 'The Unjust.' When you do this long enough, things start to blend together. That's become my homework -- how to find something new within the familiar."

It's a revealing statement from an actor whose career has been defined by finding nuance across genres, and an especially fair one given what he's up against here.

However ingenious the actor's personal touches, "Yadang: The Snitch" operates strictly within the well-worn formula of Korean crime cinema. The film's structural conceits -- the corrupt higher-ups, psychopathic villains and gratuitous violence -- follow the recipes of earlier genre touchstones such as "Public Enemy" (2002) and "Veteran" (2015). Equally familiar to the point of banality is its politics: Like dominoes arranged backward, underdogs represented by a maverick cop must triumph against all odds over the ruthless elites, who are invariably reduced to near-cartoonish villainy.

Within these confines, Yoo himself comes off as yet another recycled element in a cinematic assembly line -- audiences have more or less seen him mining this terrain multiple times before, namely in "The Unjust" as a corrupt business contractor with gangster ties and in "Veteran" as the servile sidekick to a powerful villain.

Seemingly aware of these limitations, Yoo offers a broader counterpoint. "All human lives are basically the same," he says. "People think actors or celebrities are very different. But when I appeared on the TV show 'Three Meals a Day,' that was just my natural self. My friends watched it and said, 'That's just you.'"

This naturalistic philosophy spills into his character work. "Whether I'm playing a king ('The Night Owl') or a lawyer ('Minority Opinion'), I always try to be the same person underneath. That's my baseline. Our occupations may differ, but fundamentally, we all live the same way."

The conversation lightens when it turns to Yoo's recent return to the stage. In October, he performed with Cheongju Youth Theatre Company, the troupe where he began his acting career 38 years ago, as part of their 40th anniversary celebration.

"That experience felt like an intermission for me," he says. "It was truly the happiest I've been recently."

"There were about 20 of us in a room together, and I realized how completely at ease I felt. Everyone felt the same thing: After all these years, how is it possible to feel so at home?"

As he navigates middle age in an industry facing serious headwinds -- Korean cinemas have seen investment plummet in recent years -- Yoo remains clear-eyed about the challenges ahead.

"Everything gets harder as you get older," he reflects with a hint of wistfulness in his voice. "And in terms of acting -- finding fresh stories and characters I haven't played before -- that gets harder too."

"But at the end of the day, It's all just a flow, a cycle. All I can do is work harder. My only thought is that we need to make good films so audiences feel coming to the theater was worthwhile."

"Yadang: The Snitch" opened Wednesday in South Korean theaters.