'It was about saving one person': Park Jung-min on love and action in 'Humint'

Park Jung-min has been many things on screen. A pianist with autism. A transgender fugitive. Both a blind artisan and his estranged son in the same film.

What he has never been is the sort of romantic lead women swoon over. That distinction belonged to other actors, ones considered more "conventionally attractive."

But his latest turn in Ryoo Seung-wan's "Humint," the $16 million Lunar New Year blockbuster opening Wednesday, lands him right in the thick of it. Park plays Park Geon, a North Korean intelligence operative dispatched to far eastern Russia's Vladivostok, who ends up tearing a city apart for the one woman he would sooner die than lose again.

That woman is his estranged fiancee Seon-hwa (Shin Se-kyung), a server at a state-run restaurant caught between a South Korean agent (Zo In-sung) angling to help her defect and a consul general (Park Hae-joon) who sniffs out the plan.

Strip away the spy thriller packaging, the film is essentially a weepy romance zipped into a tactical vest, two hours of bones cracking and guns blazing spent on proving that no amount of carnage can stop a man in love.

"I figure some people might go, 'Hang on, the love story is between Park Jung-min and Shin Se-kyung? Not Zo In-sung?'" he says at a cafe in Samcheong-dong, Seoul, on Monday. "Like, what is this?"

Park insists he was never really aware of the romance angle during the shoot. "It almost never crossed my mind to think, 'OK, time for some romance acting,'" he says. "It was more about saving one person. About how someone falls apart chasing that."

The one scene that nagged at him was a rare moment alone with Shin — two former lovers talking for the first time after years of separation, behind the restaurant, under the watchful eye of surveillance cameras.

It may be their only proper conversation in the entire film, one that retroactively justifies the two hours of mayhem built around it. Park first had no idea how to play it. Director Ryoo was just as lost. Even Zo In-sung, who does not appear in the sequence, showed up on set to steady things.

"After we wrapped, Zo came over and whispered in my ear, 'Good, good,' and just walked off," Park says. "Everyone was on edge that day. Though I don't think that was anyone's fault."

What he finally landed on was simple. The first line his character speaks to his former lover is: "How've you been?"

Park found that saying it flat, drained of any obvious emotion, hit harder than loading it up. "There's something about that being the only thing you can manage after all that time," he says. "It just punches you in the gut."

That instinct carried through the action, too. Even amid all the beatings and shootouts, Park was always thinking about where his character's gaze would land, who he would be looking at even as his ribs caved in.

"Getting hit and being in pain is one thing," he says. "Being in pain and still looking at someone. That's different."

"Humint" opens in theaters Wednesday.