'Notes from the Last Row' stars compare notes

Choi Min-sik went in with one image for his character: meat on a hook.

“I wanted to strip this man bare and hang him up like a slab of meat,” he said of Heo Mun-oh, the failed novelist turned embittered literature professor at the center of “Notes from the Last Row.”

“He’s a professor, an author. But learning has nothing to do with character. He’s just a lump of desire.”

Released June 26 on Netflix, the six-part suspense drama from director Kim Gyu-tae adapts a Spanish play by Juan Mayorga. Mun-oh, who published one novel long ago and nothing since, holds his mediocre students in open contempt — until he comes across Lee Kang (Choi Hyun-wook), an engineering major sitting in the back row of his class. For an assignment, Kang turns in an account of his visits to a classmate’s house — sharp-eyed, intimate stories about a family that isn’t his — and Mun-oh can’t put them down.

That classmate, it turns out, is the son of Su-hun (Huh Joon-ho), the college friend whose bestsellers Mun-oh has spent decades envying, and of Eun-joo (Kim Yunjin), the campus crush he never got over. Private lessons follow, and so does the story, chapter by chapter, each installment feeding a voyeuristic obsession that loosens the professor’s grip on his own life.

Few actors in Korea carry more weight than Choi Min-sik, 45 years in and still best known abroad as the damned avenger of “Oldboy.” In person, he is anything but brooding — he held court Thursday at a cafe in central Seoul, expansive, almost theatrical.

Still, he braced for a shrug: a slow-burn aimed at the head rather than the gut is a tough sell in a season built for louder, more outrageous fare. “It’s a stifling story, not a comfortable one — there’s plenty in it that rubs you the wrong way. Summer is when people want a good romp. I honestly wondered whether they’d go for it.”

If peering into other people’s lives is the writer’s original sin, the guilt spares no one here: the professor, the student, the viewers leaning in with them. What sold the actor was how squarely the show trains its eye on a man in freefall, and on how easily writing can turn into a weapon.

“It’s about desire — how people shatter when it’s cut off, and what’s left of them after,” Choi Min-sik said. “The violence here runs through words, through writing, never fists. And nobody walks away clean, not even the kid.”

Given the outsized turns that made his name, you might expect Choi to run the role through his own filter. He insists he did the opposite.

“The script is sheet music. Play the notes precisely, without a false chord, and the tension builds episode by episode, on its own. I didn’t rework a thing, didn’t force anything. This time I just tried to be faithful to the text.”

Fidelity nonetheless left room for shading. With director Kim, he tilted the character toward black comedy — small indignities pitched for a chuckle, a register Choi has worked before, most memorably as the oily hustler of “Nameless Gangster” — for a man the show mostly catches at his most despicable. Months inside him bred, of all things, compassion.

“People despise him, and he’s earned the finger-pointing,” he said. “But living as him, I ended up feeling for the guy. He’s just so weak. Not rotten at the core. I don’t even know where it went wrong for him. I wanted to give him a hug.”

If Mun-oh is the obsessive, his pupil is the mastermind. The inversion of power between them is the show’s real engine: the student talks his way into a stranger’s living room, blurs the line between what he saw and what he made up and watches his teacher swallow the bait.

Choi Hyun-wook, a breakout of the “Weak Hero” series, spent much of the shoot on the other side of a keyhole. “The observing he does isn’t healthy observing,” he said in a separate sitting the same day. “He’s slipping into someone’s house, listening in on lectures and private conversations. So I kept asking how a person looks at things when he’s looking in secret — and what he’s thinking. That question had to reach the viewers.”

On the page, Kang is an enigma — his motives never quite come into focus, even for the actor playing him. Rather than lean into the mystery, Choi Hyun-wook deliberately built him smaller. “I never pictured some strapping, confident type — he’s a kid who writes, and he notices things. So I started with the tics: the fidgeting, the restless leg.”

The pairing had the industry talking long before the premiere — a big-screen veteran on a rare series outing, opposite one of the fastest-rising actors of his generation, nearly 40 years apart. Choi Min-sik, who sat in on the auditions, talked about the job as an exercise in standing back.

“I just had to return his serves — receive well, and the drama rolls on its own. Mun-oh dances on a stage Kang has set. He’s a man being strung along, so my job was to be strung along well.”

Told of that assessment, the younger Choi pushed back. “Not at all. If anything, I was following him the whole way. Kang got this far because it was him across from me. Anyone else, and I think there would have been a ceiling. He pulled me along.”

Age and experience usually decide which way the admiration flows; here it clearly ran in both directions, and the veteran’s compliments sounded less like flattery than a scouting report.

“He gets it, fast,” Choi Min-sik said of his co-star. “He takes direction, understands the material with his head and his heart — and understanding means nothing if it doesn’t come out through the body. With him, it all comes out. No hesitation. You could tell how much he’d prepared, how much he’d agonized. I thought, “I’d better keep my wits about me.'”

The younger generation, he added, keeps him on his toes in more ways than one. “Watching Hyun-wook, I kept wondering — was I doing that at his age? Kids now have no hesitation about putting themselves out there. They’re brave about it. In our day, you blew one take, got chewed out, and went off to sulk in a corner. I can barely keep up.”

For all he had to say about the young, Choi Min-sik talked about age as though it had only stoked his appetite. “Nothing’s changed in how I go about the work. But the desire burns hotter than ever,” he said. “I’m finally starting to understand something about people, and I want to do more with it. I’m dying to.”

Which stories, then? “Not tales of a kind and decent world,” he said. “Stories that dig into human beings. The pathetic ones, especially. That’s what I want more of.”

“Notes from the Last Row” is streaming on Netflix.