Zo In-sung is done being the leading man

Zo In-sung walks into a press interview in Samcheong-dong, central Seoul, on Wednesday like someone who could do it in his sleep.

He greets every reporter by name, collects business cards, works the room with the kind of ease you only get from decades of doing the rounds. At 44, he gives off the easygoing, chatty vibe of someone who knows exactly who he is and where he stands.

At the moment, is atop the box office. "Humint," Ryoo Seung-wan's high-octane spy thriller, opened this week at No. 1.

He also stars in two of the year's most anticipated projects: Na Hong-jin's "Hope" and Lee Chang-dong's Netflix film "Possible Love," both set for release later this year.

That's a lot going on for a single calendar year. And yet the actor seems far more interested in talking about what he's stopped doing than what he's taken on.

"When I was younger, my acting was too mannered. Everything was dialed up to eleven," Zo says. "You get this great dialogue and you think you have to sell every single line. You lean into it from the very first word. But that's not how it works."

For most of his career, Zo was the perennial leading man -- the tall, perfectly sculpted star who carried everything from political dramas to historical epics to action tentpoles ("The King," "The Great Battle," "Escape from Mogadishu").

He was the type to play it granite-faced and dead serious, as befitting a man whose name sits above the title.

But somewhere along the way, the weight caught up with him. "After 'The Great Battle,' I was under enormous stress," he says. "With all that pressure to break even, I just felt like I wasn't cut out for it."

So he started looking elsewhere. For "Smugglers" in 2023, he took a brief but impactful supporting turn. For Disney+'s "Moving," he showed up as a superpowered agent in a handful of episodes.

The roles were smaller, but they hit different.

"The most important thing is, how do I make myself useful," he says. "If the role is small, great — I'll fit into the ensemble. You just do your part."

He ties this to the broader shifts in the industry. Before the pandemic, stardom ran on mystique; the less accessible, the better.

Now, with the box office tanking and streaming rewriting the playbook, he says the whole equation has flipped.

"If you can't get close to people, you're forgotten. And films can take forever. If you're the lead, you do one a year at best, and with post-production, it doesn't come out for two years.

"So I figured, even if the role is smaller, I'd rather just make myself useful."

With change also comes new potential. A Korean actor can now beam straight into living rooms from China to Peru without setting a foot outside the country.

Asked whether he might break through globally through his upcoming work with Na and Lee -- projects both aimed at audiences well beyond Korea-- Zo waves it off without a beat.

"No chance," he says. "At my age, how many chances do you get to learn from directors like that? I saw it as an opportunity to pick things up. That's it."

So what about a possible "Humint" sequel, then?

"People forget I'm getting older. If they say let's do this in three years, by the time the film comes out I'll be 50. At that point, you gotta recast.

"But yeah -- I'd be up for it," he says.

"Humint" is now in theaters.