Disney+ drama Big Bet stars Choi Min-sik and Lee Dong-hwi on making a ‘Korean-style’ crime series and ‘jamming’ to create their complex characters
- Choi Min-sik, who plays casino kingpin Cha Moo-sik, says instead of emulating Western gangster films, he wanted to ‘capture conflict specific to Korean people’
- He and Lee Dong-hwi, who co-stars as Cha’s treacherous sidekick, say improvisation helped them realise their complex and ‘difficult’ characters in the show
This story contains spoilers.
By Lee Gyu-lee
The Disney+ Korean series Big Bet explores the dark, macho world of casinos through the eyes of its lead character, Cha Moo-sik, a Korean casino mogul in the Philippines.
Actor Choi Min-sik, who played Cha, says he wanted to emphasise Korean sentiments in this crime series.
“The story moves forward centring on Cha’s narrative; his relationship with his mother and with his wife … I wanted to capture the conflicts that are specific to Korean people,” he says.
“I had in mind not to follow Western gangster movies or noir-genre works. Even in the last scene, I wanted it to have Korean-style reality.”
Even a very ordinary person can commit vicious acts
The crime saga, which ended after the conclusion of its second season on March 29, follows Cha, a self-made businessman who became a legendary figure in the Philippines’ casino world.
Growing up in a poor family with an abusive father, Cha always had an eye out for ways to make money, starting an after-school academy and illegal gambling business in Korea.
After fleeing to the Philippines to avoid tax evasion charges, Cha puts his business skills to use and forges his way through the cutthroat casino world with his right-hand man Yang Jung-pal (Lee Dong-hwi).
Big Bet season 2: Choi Min-sik crime saga on Disney+ comes to satisfying end
He does whatever it takes to maintain his influence, even if it means getting his hands dirty and making countless enemies who are waiting to take him down.
“I didn’t set clear boundaries of good and evil. For example, even though a person’s bad or evil, I don’t see him or her as completely that way,” he says.
“Even a very ordinary person can commit vicious acts. I don’t believe [Cha’s] childhood made him who he is. There are people who live a righteous life despite having an unfortunate childhood.
“But he was chasing after his desire so he came across the wrong people, and as he pursues money and power he digs himself deeper into a hole.
“There’s no 100 per cent bad person or 100 per cent good person. So I wanted to portray the variability of a human.”
Cha’s life comes to a miserable end when Yang, his trusted right hand man, betrays him and shoots him in the head, taking all of the wealth he collected over the years.
Choi notes that he planted a flower in the scene where Cha has his last meal with his men as a metaphor for his inevitable death.
“I wanted to show a man who has been chasing after greed dying in vain all of a sudden. Jung-pal was like Cha’s troubled kid, like his little brother,” he says.
“Like the leaves falling off a flower, I felt it was only right for Cha to leave the stage that way … A brutal end, especially at the hands of someone he trusted. It was the final result of a person who’s gone to the extreme end of his desire.”
The second season ends with Yang showing up six months after Cha’s death, having started his own casino in Las Vegas with Cha’s money.
Lee says that this egocentric, ungrateful character was one of the hardest he’s played in his career.
“I thought of him as a person who has bitten off more than he can chew and doesn’t know how to control it,” he says.
“You have to pay what you owe but Yang does things that you cannot understand easily. So I contemplated how to make him convincing to viewers,” he says, adding he feels the character is unimaginably evil.
“Jung-pal is so brazen and shameless to the point he forgets he owes people money. He is impudent and only cares about himself … Because I didn’t have any elements I could relate to, creating Jung-pal was difficult.”
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The cast members stayed over two months in the Philippines to shoot the series, and spent their days off together to discuss and study the script, according to the two actors.
“On the days that we didn’t film, we could have meetings in our hotel room. Because there were a substantial number of characters [in the series], we would study the script to find ways to make them plausible,” Choi says.
“With Lee, we would discuss improvised lines. We were like, ‘let’s express everything we want’. It was as if we were jamming like jazz musicians … These [actors] know how to play as a team.”
Lee adds that it was the best environment to stay focused on work.
“Because of the Covid-19 quarantine, we couldn’t go back and forth home. And with our work schedule we didn’t have much free time to enjoy ourselves. So all we could do was read the scripts.
“In terms of concentration, this was the most focused I’ve ever been at work,” he says. “Working with such a great actor like Choi allowed me to realise my shortcomings and inspired me to keep working hard to be a good actor.”
