Lee Minho’s Comment on Pachinko: Season 2 is about Hansu and Sunja’s complicated relationship! + Details

Lee Minho’s Comment on Pachinko: As South Korean superstar Lee Minho prepared to return to set for Pachinko season two, he didn’t revisit the first season.

“I didn’t really review season one again,” Lee tells T&C. “I thought about how did I feel when I first met Hansu, how did I feel when Hansu first met Sunja and when they break up, and how did it feel when he lost his dad. So I did a lot of imagination process in this regard, and also tried to revive that emotion again by listening to the music that I listened to when I prepared for season one.” That music, Lee says, includes “a list of music that the actor Al Pacino listened to at the filming stage for Godfather,” which he says he found on YouTube. “That was one of my favorites,” he said.

Lee Minho’s Comment on Pachinko: For Lee, going back to Pachinko was a very “special” experience. “I love this show very much and I appreciate the fact that I can work with nice people for a long time,” he says. “I really appreciate the good time for the six months [of filming].”

Stay with this part of celebrities from the series of entertainment in Eternal Pen magazine.

Lee Minho’s Comment on Pachinko

Hansu and Sunja’s relationship is one of the main storylines of season two of Pachinko.

Lee Minho’s Comment on Pachinko: In the Apple TV+ drama, Lee gives a standout performance as Koh Hansu, a powerful Korean businessman who lives in Osaka, Japan. During season one, Hansu becomes the broker of the fish market in Yeongdo, a small village in Japanese-occupied Korea. There, he falls for Sunja (Minha Kim), and they sleep together—she becomes pregnant, but he reveals he’s already married, and she refuses to be his mistress. Sunja then marries Isak, a sick priest who offers to help her, and they leave Yeongdo for Osaka.

At the start of season two, it’s 1945. Japan is being bombed, and Sunja and Hansu haven’t seen each other in seven years. Lee believes that Hansu spent those years apart still loving her. “Hansu’s emotion towards Sunja is really, really authentic,” he explains. “There should have been many moments for him where he really missed Sunja and where he really wanted to see her, however, he just didn’t show himself in front of her and was just watching her from distance.”

Sunja and Hansu have a very complicated relationship.

Lee Minho’s Comment on Pachinko: In thinking about Hansu and Sunja’s love story this season, Pachinko creator Soo Hugh says, she took direction from Lee himself. “I love what Minho says about Hansu; Minho says Hansu is always four steps ahead of everyone,” she says. “So when he does something he already knows, he’s already triangulated, he’s already played the chess moves. I love when he said that it made me want to, in our show, say, ‘oh, I’d love to see the person or the moments when he can’t do it.’ Because if Hansu’s able to play the chess game with 99.99% of it, Sunja has to be the one person he can’t do that with, and that has to be the energy between them.”

Lee Minho’s Comment on Pachinko: Hansu and Sunja’s relationship, as actress Kim put it to T&C, is “complicated.” Hugh adds, “Hansu is tricky. We don’t want to portray him as some dashing hero. He does some terrible things, and his relationship with Sunja is very problematic, as well. There’s something about wanting to portray their relationship as something that’s romantic, complicated, problematic, difficult—all in one breath.”

Pachinko, which is based on Min Jin Lee’s book of the same name, follows two different timelines: Sunja in 1945 and Sunja in 1989. Hansu hasn’t yet appeared in the second timeline, and Lee says he hopes his character will. “I hope it goes in a way where, well, he was so ambitious, he struggled so much, however, in the end, he didn’t really get what he really, really wanted,” he says.

Lee Minho’s Comment on Pachinko: For viewers who tune into Pachinko, Lee says, “I hope that people will understand that while each of these individuals struggles for survival, also among them, there was love—even under such environment there was love. And, based on the power of love, they were surviving.”

Lee Minho’s Comment on Pachinko: The first two episodes of Pachinko are now streaming on Apple TV+.