After nearly 30 years acting, Lee Jung-jae is used to being approached by devotees of his work. But recently he was in a restaurant in his native South Korea when a man a few years his senior went up to him as he was about to leave. “Usually my fans are much younger than me,” Lee says in an interview with the South China Morning Post this week. “He told me he was in his mid-50s, and he said, ‘I’m becoming more hopeful. I’m getting older but you can always have success later in your life. You’re giving me a lot of courage to live a better life.’” Lee, who turns 50 in December, is living proof of that. Despite a career that began as a fashion model, before he transitioned to television and film, the last year has seen Lee move to another level. First, there has been the breakout success as the lead character in the Netflix sensation Squid Game , a show that shocked everyone with its phenomenal popularity worldwide. Now Lee is at the Cannes Film Festival, presenting his first film as director, Hunt , an explosive thriller set in 1980s Korea. We’re meeting in a quiet studio space, just off the Rue d’Antibes in Cannes, France, where Lee – dressed in a sharp navy suit and white shirt with metallic collar studs – has just been posing for photographs. All part of an average day’s work for a hot debutant director at the Cannes Film Festival. After our interview he’ll be attending the gala premiere of Decision to Leave , the latest film from his fellow countryman Park Chan-wook. Cannes has been good to Korean cinema of late. Three years ago, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite premiered here before going on to win the festival’s Palme d’Or and scooping multiple Oscars. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence,” Lee says, when asked about the impact of Korean cinema. “Korean people are very open to other cultures, they’re keen to accept other cultures, they’re very interested in other cultures. So keeping our culture, but accepting other cultures, really mixes well and now it’s a blooming season for Korean content and cinema.” Just yesterday, Lee met a woman from Saudi Arabia who told him she not only watches all the premium Korean dramas, but even the daytime TV soap operas. “I was so surprised,” he says with a chuckle. Certainly, Hunt feels like it pulls all the right moves to travel globally. Set at a time when South Korea was under an autocratic government, the film sees Lee play Park Pyong-ho, a member of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, who is caught up in a desperate search for a North Korean mole in their ranks. It’s fast, frenzied and blends thrilling set pieces with nail-biting drama. Little wonder Cannes selected it for an out-of-competition Midnight Screening slot; the on-screen jolts it provides are like mainlining caffeine – something most festival goers need right now. Lee wanted his character to look exhausted, a result of being under constant “psychological stress”, which is a feeling admirably conveyed to viewers. But it’s not a world entirely new to the Seoul-born actor. While he has gained fans for broad comedies like Oh! Brothers (2003) and acclaimed art house movies like erotic melodrama The Housemaid (2010), which previously competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, there’s been a fair share of thrillers too, notably 2005’s hijack tale Typhoon , which at the time was Korea’s highest-budgeted movie ever. But when I tell Lee he could make it in a Hollywood action movie, he looks shocked. “Oh really?” he says, eyebrows raised. The dense plot for Hunt was inspired by current global crises and conflicts. “When there’s a political campaign, I see a lot of fake information and fake news. When people read those fake news [reports], they believe it and this sways their values and beliefs … but in Korea, the ’80s was the epitome of that. There was so much fake news and control of information and the government [releasing] a lot of propaganda.” Lee also rewatched classic American 1970s conspiracy thrillers like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation – but only to ensure he veered away from them. “I wanted to make sure the name [of this film] is not tainted with copying another movie.” The film sees him co-star with Jung Woo-sung, who plays a rival agent. While both characters end up investigating the other in this desperate search for the mole, in reality Lee is long-term friends with Jung. They previously worked on 1998’s City of the Rising Sun and, in 2016, formed a talent management agency, Artist Company (an offshoot of which, Artist Studio, is a co-producer on Hunt ). Lee hasn’t stopped there, with other business ventures including a chain of Italian restaurants and a real estate company also on his books. Now he can add “director” to his CV, although initially he wasn’t even planning to call the shots behind the camera. “I didn’t have any ambition of directing,” he admits. “Just because I have been acting for 30 years, I didn’t think I was good enough to direct.” Lee bought the rights to the story, penned by another writer, and was originally planning to produce. “I was looking for a director and a scriptwriter to work with me, but I couldn’t really find the right ones. So I took it into my own hands, started writing the script, but didn’t know I would write, direct and produce this film.” Taking the lead on, too, just added to the pressure. “It was very, very challenging,” he adds. Lee says the success of Squid Game and the arrival of Hunt were “total coincidence”. He was rewriting the script while shooting the Netflix show, then went into production on his film before the TV sensation came out. Starring as Seong Gi-hun, a divorced gambling addict who enters a deadly survival contest, Lee has watched as Squid Game became Netflix’s most watched show ever. As a result, he was nominated for several prominent US acting awards, including the Screen Actors Guild. A second season is currently in development, and being readied for a 2023 release. He is still at a loss to explain the success of the show. “Just to make sure that you know, Squid Game is even more popular overseas than the local Korean market. So I was really surprised. And thanks to Squid Game , a lot of overseas productions are approaching me, giving me offers about acting in one of their shows. And now that Hunt has been released, I have offers of scriptwriting, directing and producing as well.” And like that fan in the restaurant noted, Lee is a fine example of never giving up in life. “It could be something small,” he says, “but if you have passion and you stick with it long enough, then something good is going to happen to you.” Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook