It didn’t take lengthy for Park Chan-wook to appreciate his Sympathizer star Robert Downey Jr. was a kindred spirit. The iconic South Korean filmmaker, identified for genre-busting movies like Oldboy and Decision to Leave, made his title by toying with tone, smashing collectively wild humor and brutal violence, and subverting expectations from body to border. And when Downey took on the duty of enjoying a bunch of various characters in HBO’s new restricted sequence (premiering April 14), the Oscar-nominated actor too stored everybody on their toes. “I was astounded by how quickly he was able to come up with a very different performance—he’d do a different improv for each and every take,” Park says. “Even when I had a good-enough take, I had to fall back and suppress myself from asking for more. It was unbelievable to see.”
Such unpredictability, it seems, is exactly what you have to adapt The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize–profitable 2015 novel about an unnamed Vietcong spy–slash–refugee settling into Los Angeles close to the tip of the Vietnam War. The ebook took gonzo turns towards completely different moods and concepts in its exploration of fraught cultural duality and the overwhelming power of Americanism. The South Vietnam–born Nguyen challenged well-liked narratives of the conflict, and extra broadly, painted a captivating portrait of a younger man caught between two worlds—and much more genres. Some would name the novel “unfilmable;” others could be keen to take dangers, honor the textual content’s spirit, and by no means get complacent.
Co-showrunner Don McKellar was intimidated by the prospect. In truth, “I had a hard time picturing it actually before Chan-wook’s name was mentioned,” he says. He and Park, Nguyen’s “dream director” for an adaptation, had collaborated up to now and synced as much as helm The Sympathizer collectively. “It’s angry and satiric and very intelligent and also not afraid to tackle big themes—but it’s also very playful in a way that’s sort of surprising for the heavy subject matter,” McKellar says of the ebook. “Our main strategy was to replicate that voice cinematically by bringing in Park Chan-wook, because he really shares that sensibility. His work has that edge. He can do satire, he can be devastating, but he also has this playfulness and this wit.”