Choi Woo-shik on 'Number One': 'I always took the safe path -- this one scared me'

Choi Woo-shik was 24 when he and director Kim Tae-yong worked on "Set Me Free" together. Both were nobodies: Choi was still doing bit parts on the side and Kim was directing his first feature.

The film became an indie sensation. It swept that year's awards circuit, won Choi Best New Actor at Busan, and set everything in motion.

A decade later, they've reunited for "Number One," a fairy-tale family drama about a son who begins to see numbers floating above his mother's head: a countdown, he later realizes, for her remaining days.

"When he first asked, I wasn't so sure," Choi says, sitting in a Samcheong-dong cafe in Seoul on Tuesday. "'Set Me Free' meant so much to both of us, and people really loved it. I kept thinking, maybe we should just leave it where it is."

Then Kim told him what had happened: his own mother, estranged for over twenty years, had passed away just before production began. "I'd been on the fence until then," Choi says. "But when he told me that, I got it. I knew how much this project meant to him."

The role came with a catch. For the first time, Choi had to act in Busan dialect — no small feat for a guy who grew up in Vancouver.

"It's not just words. It's the attitude, the rhythm. Natives can always tell when you're faking it. And if that turns people off, that's on me." He leaned hard on co-star Jang Hye-jin, a Busan native playing his on-screen mother — and, as it happens, his fictional mother in "Parasite" too.

After all these years, the weight of "Set Me Free" still looms large. Choi says he can't even bring himself to rewatch it because of all the emotions wrapped up in there. "But without that film, there's no 'Parasite.' I owe the director everything."

Still, he figures, that old chemistry is still there. "Back then we were young, inexperienced, no pretense — we just clicked. Now we've both been through some stuff. It feels different, but it's still there."

"Number One" hits theaters Wednesday.