Park Hae-soo rides wave of global fame with The Great Flood

Seated in a Samcheong-dong cafe recently, the South Korean actor is processing the news that his latest film, The Great Flood, has rocketed to the top of Netflix’s global charts - No. 1 in more than 50 countries — within days of its Dec 19 release.

- 

Park Hae-soo plays a security operative in The Great Flood. PHOTO: NETFLIX The Great Flood is available on Netflix.

(NETFLIX)

For most actors, this would be a novel sensation. For Park, it is closer to deja vu. The 44-year-old has become a face that viewers overseas would recognise from Netflix’s ever-expanding Korean roster.

You do not forget his Sang-woo in Squid Game (2021 to 2025) - the finance bro who had it all before finding himself neck-deep in the rot.

That 2021 breakout practically handed him a golden ticket to the streaming giant’s pipeline. Since then, he has starred in Narco-Saints (2022) and Money Heist: Korea (2022), and most recently played a prosecutor in the drama The Price Of Confession.

Park is an unprecedented product of an unprecedented era, when a Korean actor can beam directly into living rooms from Sao Paulo to Stockholm without setting a foot outside South Korea.

But even for him, The Great Flood is a curious case, one that is topping charts despite, or perhaps because of, the sheer bewilderment it has provoked.

Director Kim Byung-woo’s Netflix original opens as garden-variety disaster spectacle: Seoul drowning under biblical floods, young mother Anna (Kim Da-mi) clawing her way up a sinking high-rise with her son in tow.