A performance that makes history feel lived—and deserves an audience far beyond Korea
Yoo Hae-jin’s performance in The Assassins did not feel like acting.
It felt like encountering someone who had actually lived through the world the film was trying to recreate.
Curiously, it was Park Hae-il and Lee Min-ho who kept reminding me that I was watching a movie. As reporters for the fictional Dongsung Ilbo, they embody an ideal of journalism so unwavering that it feels almost beyond the reach of the present.
They are everything we want journalists to be: committed to the public’s right to know, resistant to intimidation, and prepared to defend their responsibilities at enormous personal cost.
They endure beatings and threats without surrendering their convictions. A broken hand, a kick from a military boot—nothing seems capable of extinguishing their insistence that a journalist has a duty to the public. At times, they reminded me of Superman getting back on his feet and brushing the dust from his shoulders.
There is something moving about that idealism. There is also something unmistakably cinematic about it.
With their screen presence and almost impossibly handsome faces, Park and Lee make these reporters seem larger than life. Watching them, I occasionally found myself wondering: Were there really people like this? Could anyone remain so resolute?
Whenever that question threatened to pull me out of the film, Yoo Hae-jin brought me back.
His presence gives the story weight. As the film reaches toward an ideal, he keeps its feet on the ground. His face, his physical bearing, his delivery, and the way he inhabits his character all make the world around him feel tangible.
The contrast is essential to the film’s balance. Park and Lee give us an image of the courage we hope human beings can possess. Yoo makes us believe that such courage must exist among people who are recognizably human.
His humor is especially important.
In another actor’s hands, some of the comic moments might have felt forced, or like brief interruptions inserted to relieve the tension. With Yoo, they seem to belong to the person. Even his more exaggerated gestures carry the texture of everyday behavior: awkwardness, wit, absurdity, and the small ways people get through circumstances larger than themselves.
He makes humor feel compatible with fear and historical gravity. Life does not stop being strange or occasionally funny simply because the times are dark.
That quality allows him to guide the entire film. He becomes the audience’s point of contact with its world, carrying the story forward while keeping us close to its human scale.
He meets the audience at eye level.
When I try to think of another actor with a comparable ability, Sean Penn is one of the few who comes to mind. Penn has played heightened, dramatic, even heroic characters, but at his best he gives a film the feeling of a life unfolding in front of us.
Yoo has that same power. You stop registering the decisions of an actor and begin accepting the existence of a person.
I deeply admire Choi Min-sik and Lee Byung-hun as well. Yet in some of their performances, I remain aware of the force of their screen presence—the intensity, the command, the moments that make you think, What a tremendous actor.
With Yoo, that awareness often disappears. I am watching the character before I remember to admire the performance.
His expressiveness can be broad, but it rarely feels concerned with making him look impressive. It belongs to the humor and humanity of the scene. He gives the impression that the character existed before the camera arrived and will continue to exist after it leaves.
In The Assassins, that ability has particular significance.
A historical thriller can make the past exciting while leaving it emotionally distant. Political violence becomes suspense; suffering becomes plot; the people caught in events become vehicles for the next revelation.
Yoo prevents that distance from opening up. His performance continually reconnects the film’s dramatic machinery to the human reality underlying its historical setting.
The film is a dramatization, not a documentary. Yet he sustains the feeling that the past involved people as tangible as those around us today—people with habits, contradictions, humor, and lives that could be damaged beyond repair.
For an international audience unfamiliar with Korea’s history, that human connection can be the most important way into the film. Viewers may arrive without knowing the political background. They can still recognize vulnerability, intimidation, stubbornness, and the effort to hold on to a sense of right and wrong.
This is where The Assassins could make a meaningful contribution to world cinema.
Its Korean history gives the story its identity. Its questions travel: What does the public have a right to know? What happens when telling the truth becomes dangerous? How does a person preserve a conscience under pressure?
The film brings those questions into contact with both journalistic idealism and ordinary human behavior. Its humor allows the characters to breathe; its tension gives their choices consequences. Yoo’s performance holds those elements together.
For filmmakers and actors elsewhere, there is something worth studying here: how a performance can anchor an ambitious political drama without constantly announcing its importance. How humor can deepen a character’s credibility. How an actor can carry a film while making the audience forget the labor involved.
And for audiences, there is the much simpler pleasure of watching an extraordinary actor make every moment feel inhabited.
Calling Yoo Hae-jin a “national treasure” is meant as praise in Korea. After this film, the description feels geographically too small.
His stature should extend far beyond the country that already knows how good he is. International audiences, critics, festival programmers, and distributors should be paying close attention. The Assassins offers a compelling opportunity to introduce him to viewers who have not yet discovered the full range of his talent.
That recognition should begin with the work itself. Watch how he gives the film balance. Watch how naturally the humor emerges. Watch how he keeps the story connected to the lives that history can otherwise reduce to names, dates, and political explanations.
Few films about Korea’s darker past have struck me as so tightly constructed and so alive to the people within them. At the center is Yoo Hae-jin, sustaining the thread between the drama on screen and the human reality beyond it.
For me, The Assassins is the best film of 2026 so far, and Yoo gives its finest performance.
Korean audiences should not be the only ones who get to experience it.
The world needs to see him.
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