It didn’t take long for Park Chan-wook to realize his Sympathizer star Robert Downey Jr. was a kindred spirit. The iconic South Korean filmmaker, known for genre-busting films like Oldboy and Decision to Leave, made his name by toying with tone, smashing together wild humor and brutal violence, and subverting expectations from frame to frame. And when Downey took on the task of playing a bunch of different characters in HBO’s new limited series (premiering April 14), the Oscar-nominated actor too kept everyone 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 turns out, is precisely what you need to adapt The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2015 novel about an unnamed Vietcong spy–slash–refugee settling into Los Angeles near the end of the Vietnam War. The book took gonzo turns toward different moods and ideas in its exploration of fraught cultural duality and the overwhelming force of Americanism. The South Vietnam–born Nguyen challenged popular narratives of the war, and more broadly, painted a fascinating portrait of a young man caught between two worlds—and far more genres. Some would call the novel “unfilmable;” others might be willing to take risks, honor the text’s spirit, and never get complacent.
Co-showrunner Don McKellar was intimidated by the prospect. In fact, “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 in the past and synced up to helm The Sympathizer together. “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 book. “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.”
