Song Kang-ho plays Samsik in the Korean drama Uncle Samsik. The multiple award-winning actor plays a mysterious power broker and fixer during Korea’s turbulent post war years. Song’s 30-year film career includes dozens of films, among them Parasite, Snowpiercer, The Attorney, A Taxi Driver, Broker and Memories of Murder, but he’s never acted in a TV drama before. Not until Uncle Samsik. Song’s fans might be surprised by this choice. He’s not.
“I think it was very natural for me because there were a lot of changes in the production environment, especially since the global pandemic,” said Song. “There has been so much change, and now we have so many more channels to communicate with the viewers, the fans, and the audience, not just through theater and movies, but there are a lot of different channels. Now, it may be a little bit more complex for the actors, but I think it's just natural that we want to use all of these different channels to communicate with our fans and the audience.”
The historical television series, which also stars Byun Yo-han, Lee Kyu-hyung, Jin Ki-joo, and Seo Hyun-woo, premiered internationally on Disney+ in April and in the U.S. on Hulu in May. The series was written and directed by Shin Yeon-shick and it’s not the first time Song and Shin have collaborated.
“I can actually say that this is my first collaboration with director Shin that I'll be showing to the audience,” said Song. “There is this other film that I worked on together with him. He was the director for this movie called One Win, which is a small budget sports film, but it hasn't been released yet. We did collaborate on the film Cobweb before, but that was directed by someone else, and director Shin was actually the writer for the film. So as a director and actor, this is the first collaboration that you're going to see.”
Uncle Samsik is set during the early 60s, a tumultuous time in Korean history.
“At the time, it was just after the Korean War,” said Song. “It hadn’t even been 10 years since the Korean War. Everything was pretty much in remnants and nothing was set in stone. The politics, the social aspects, the culture, everything was very complex and nothing was really stable. Everyone was dreaming of a new world and they had to build it from bottom up. That led to a lot of clashes within the society and it was a very turbulent era.”
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Uncle Samsik, whose name means “three meals a day,” is a product of an era when few people could afford to eat three meals a day. The character learned to be a power broker out of the desire to survive and he genuinely wants to help people, but he’s not above hurting them. He’s sometimes beneficent and sometimes cruel. He feeds people, yet he might also commit murder. Even though such complexity makes the character seem real, Samsik is not based on anyone in particular.
“He’s a fictitious character,” said Song. “Because the show is set against a very tumultuous period in Korea, I think he is someone that talks to all the different kinds of emotional states that Korean people had during the turbulent times. So he could be bad sometimes, he could be good; sometimes he could be very evil. So, you might be very curious about what he's really thinking and what he really wants in the end. If you watch the whole 16 episodes, you’ll finally realize what kind of person Uncle Samsik is, and I think he depicts all the different states of mind people had during the times.”
While Samsik was not modeled on anyone in particular, Song is sure someone like him might have existed in that era, adding that “someone like him could exist in our own era as well.”
Song has crafted so many memorable characters that it may seem like the award-winning actor has some special process for creating them. According to Song, the process is as simple as trying to understand how a character might act based on how they feel about the world. Some kinds of preparation actually seem counterproductive.
“If I try to paint a picture of a character inside my head, then that could only lead to an act or a performance,” said Song. “But when I really feel the character and immerse myself into the character, I could relive his life. So, I always ask the question of ‘what if?’ What if I was Samsik? What would I have done? I try to feel what he felt in his life in order to live the life of Samsik when I'm shooting. Instead of trying to set up all these different characteristics of my character inside my head, I just try to feel him and try to become him so that I wouldn't be acting, but just reliving his life.”
While the drama’s events happen shortly before a 1961 military coup in Korea, the story focuses on the characters, how they strive to survive and realize their dreams, rather than on the political chaos accelerating in the background.
“We don’t go deep into the incident or directly talk about that,” said Song. “But it is there in the background. This series is not really about the macro political structures and the things that happened politically, but it's really about the people within that system and how they felt and how they aspire to build a new world. So while there are hints of that coup, it's not something that we directly deal with.”
In the drama Samsik becomes intrigued by an idealistic young government worker named Kim San, played by Byun. He likes Kim’s plan for rebuilding Korea and believes that he can help him realize that plan. Mostly he’s drawn to Kim’s passion.
“It was such a turbulent time,” said Song. “They saw clashes of selfishness all the time, and during all those things, what he saw in Kim San was that pure passion, which was so rare at the time. While Kim San was not sophisticated, he knew that he could make use of that pure passion to create the idealistic world that he was dreaming of. I think that's why he really wanted to recruit him.”
So, how did acting in a drama measure up after appearing in dozens of films? At 16 episodes, the drama definitely took longer to film than your average movie.
“It wasn't that big of a difference,” said Song. “But because there's more screen time in a series, more scenes, the schedules are a little bit more densely packed. I knew that I had to really pull myself together to make sure that I didn't miss out on anything.”
The experience has not discouraged Song from acting in another drama and it might not even take another 30 years.
“Sure,” he said. “Why not? Whenever there’s a good opportunity, I would be happy to join.”
Uncle Samsik will air two episodes per week until a three-part season finale on June 19.
