At 43, Bae Sung-woo is no newbie to acting.

He says he’s always been working since he graduated from college at 29 -- but it wasn’t until this year that he made his mark with the general public. 

Bae was the face of a distraught office worker driven to murder in the Cannes-invited “Office.” He played Woo-jin, the man who wakes up with a different appearance every morning in “The Beauty Inside.” He was the leader of an illicit international car dealership in the runaway hit “Veteran.” On Oct. 22, he appeared in theaters in two movies opening simultaneously -- “The Phone” and “The Exclusive: Beat the Devil's Tattoo.”

And it was one of these movies that gave him his first major lead role: “The Phone,” a sci-fi crime thriller in which a man receives a phone call from his wife on the anniversary of her death. He realizes that she’s calling from a year ago in time and has just one day to keep the murder from happening.

Bae plays the killer Jae-hyeon, who is hunting a woman in 2014, and her husband in 2015. He said he wanted to make the character as believable as possible.

“A lot of killers are portrayed as psychopaths or all-powerful,” he told The Korea Herald, “but I approached this role of Do Jae-hyeon as being a sustenance killer. He’s a killer because he has to be to make ends meet, or maybe to make his life just a little bit richer.”

When asked if he was generally drawn to characters that were less archetypal and more believable, Bae noted that audiences found it easier to connect to those characters.

“People find absolute evil to be boring,” he said.

“All people have two sides to them. I like characters that don’t necessarily stir up empathy, but do allow some level of understanding about the reasons for their actions. Audiences get drawn into those characters, identify with them. There are some characters that you like to watch from far away, but I like characters that ask you to understand them.”

Despite Bae’s penchant for a level of complexity both in characters and genres -- he says he likes movies “without a particular genre” like “Moneyball” or “Foxcatcher” -- what he likes best about “The Phone” is its simplicity.

“You see a lot of genres being integrated in movies these days. A movie might be a thriller, but it’ll have comedy and drama. A comedy will have sad elements to it. I prefer something simpler that maximizes the appeal of a particular genre. ‘The Phone’ does have fantastical elements to it, but it maintains speed and continues pushing forward to its conclusion.”

After “The Phone” and “The Exclusive,” Bae is set to appear in the comedy “You Call it Passion” with Jung Jae-young and Park Bo-young, as well as the crime drama “Inside Men” with Lee Byung-hun and Cho Seung-woo. Bae acknowledged that his filmography was a bit all over the map, and said that he felt the need to begin creating his own dramatic color.

“I’ve had directors tell me that I should find more funny, loveable parts, and other directors tell me that I should play more characters that are stronger and more intense. I appreciate both sides. I’m thinking about alternating back and forth,” he joked. 

“But I think that in the end all of my characters need to have Bae Sung-woo at their base, and I should start making that base more concrete."

He added that 2015 was like a beat board. “Not a springboard. I’m afraid of jumping on springs that will take me too far in one direction,” he said. “It’s a beat board, which if I jump on carefully the right way, will give me the right push.”

“The Phone” opened in theaters on Oct. 22.

By Won Ho-jung (hjwon@heraldcorp.com)