Choi Min-sik and Han So-hee's Korean Remake of The Intern Opens September 16

The Korean remake of The Intern held its press screening on the 4th at CGV Yongsan IPark Mall in Seoul, with director Kim Do-young and actors Choi Min-sik, Han So-hee, Kim Jun-han, and Ryu Hye-young in attendance. The film opens on the 16th, rated for audiences 12 and older, and runs 132 minutes, eleven minutes longer than the 2015 Hollywood original.

The premise follows the broad outline of Nancy Meyers's original: Giho (Choi Min-sik), a retired 37-year veteran of the publishing industry who spent his career making maps, applies on impulse for a senior internship at a fashion startup called Wutoutu. He is assigned directly to the company's CEO, Sunwoo (Han So-hee), who built the company into a 10-billion-won revenue business in three years.

A different center of gravity

Where the original leaned heavily on Ben's (Robert De Niro) almost frictionless wisdom, Kim Do-young has shifted the weight. "I thought of this film as Sunwoo's story of growth," Kim said at the screening. "She is a successful CEO, but she constantly blames herself and feels inadequate. I wanted to build a narrative about overcoming that anxiety." Sunwoo's choices in the second half of the film, and the degree to which she learns to trust herself, are where the emotional payoff sits.

Giho's character has also been recalibrated. Rather than the idealized, almost oracular mentor of the original, he arrives uncertain, struggling to adapt to a digital workplace and a culture shaped by people a generation younger than him. Choi Min-sik played the role with what Kim described as effortless force: "He used no visible effort, and yet the performance was full of it. Calling cut on his takes felt like a privilege."

The conflict around both characters is more sharply drawn than in the source material. Sunwoo faces specific pressures at work and at home that the remake names rather than softens. The supporting cast carries additional workplace texture, including storylines about credit being stolen by managers, overwork, and workplace harassment, which the filmmakers added to close the distance between the story and a Korean audience's daily experience.

Choi Min-sik on restraint and reinvention

Casting Choi Min-sik to replace Robert De Niro was, by most accounts, the obvious call: few Korean actors carry comparable institutional weight, with Oldboy (2003), A Bittersweet Life (2005), and Roaring Currents (2014) among his landmarks. When the remake's first trailer dropped, comments sections filled with parodies of his most famous lines adapted to an internship context, the kind of meme traction that speaks to how deeply his previous characters have embedded themselves.

He receives that warmly and uneasily at the same time. "It means the work has left a mark, which I'm genuinely grateful for," he said when asked about the response. "But as an actor, having your past image overlap with something new is not entirely comfortable. You want people to let go of that and see this."

Giho is, by design, nothing like the roles that produced those memes. "For me, this was putting on a completely different set of clothes," Choi said. "Entering an emotionally and structurally different world brings its own excitement. Even setting aside what audiences or critics conclude, the fact that I pursued this change myself gives me a strange satisfaction." He lost weight for the role, partly for the wardrobe requirements and partly for health reasons, and he was quick to clarify, with a laugh, that it was achieved through diet and exercise rather than medication.

In practice, Choi's approach on set mirrored Giho's approach in the film. "I tried to become water," he said. "If the container is square, become square. If it's triangular, become triangular. I knew that if I didn't harmonize with these younger colleagues, the film wouldn't come together." Some of Giho's more distinctive lines were improvised by Choi on set; the film's production also had an unplanned detour, having been shelved in 2020 when Warner Bros. exited the Korean market, then revived when the studio re-entered it.

The generational question

Kim Do-young came to the project immediately after finishing post-production on If We (2025), her remake of the Chinese film Us and Them, which drew around 2.6 million admissions domestically despite skepticism ahead of its release. Her willingness to take on another remake, she said, came down to the chance to work with Choi Min-sik.

The thematic angle Kim emphasizes is the difficulty of cross-generational connection in a culture that has developed precise, often derisive labels for every demographic cohort. She cited the proliferation of Korean internet slang that sorts people by age and gender and frequently tips into contempt. "This is a labeling society," she said. "The Intern is a story about colliding with someone who carries a different label and finding, through that friction, understanding, friendship, trust." Ryu Hye-young, who plays one of the startup's younger employees, summarized it more lightly at the press event: the film is about what happens when the 'old generation' and the 'young generation' end up laughing together.

Han So-hee, for her part, said the production left her thinking about the limits of self-reliance. "When you push too hard alone, you eventually overload," she said. "You need the help of people older than you, of colleagues, of mentors. Life is just too much to carry alone."

The film opens in Korea on the 16th and is scheduled for release across nine Asian markets, including Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Malaysia, the following month. Warner Bros. Korea and Anthology Studio are co-distributing.