Han So-hee on Choi Min-sik: 'A Mountain You Can Never Climb Over'

Han So-hee showed up to her first meeting with The Intern director Kim Do-young dressed to match Jules, the character Anne Hathaway played in the 2015 Hollywood original. Hair, outfit, everything. It was not a styling accident; she wanted Choi Min-sik as her co-star badly enough to make the case in the room before she'd said a single word.

"When in my lifetime would I ever get to work with Min-sik sunbaenim in a film?" she said at a cafe in Jongno-gu, Seoul on the 8th. "I felt the director and I were on the same wavelength, too. So I just grabbed on with everything I had."

The character she couldn't resist

In the Korean remake, Han plays Seon-woo, a young CEO who built her fashion startup Utututu past 10 billion won in revenue within three years. She obsesses over every detail, down to a single hanger on a showroom rack, but also sends a critical text about someone directly to that person by mistake and misses her husband's book launch because work won't stop. The "imperfect perfectionist," as Han describes it, is a version of herself she recognized immediately.

"I drive myself to the edge of a cliff when I'm preparing for a role," she said. "I know I'm not perfect, that I'm unfinished, and that's exactly why I keep pushing."

For Han, who built her reputation through the intensity of dramas like My Name (2021) and Gyeongseong Creature (2023-2024) and the 2026 film Project Y, Seon-woo represents a deliberate shift. The performance is reactive rather than propulsive, built from anxiety and self-doubt rather than action sequences. "Slice-of-life acting is genuinely difficult," she said. "There's action and reaction, and this role was all about the reaction. I thought about that a lot."

Before shooting an izakaya scene where Seon-woo finally opens up completely to Giho, she lost sleep and couldn't eat properly. The pressure of getting it right with Choi Min-sik across the table was that real.

What Choi Min-sik didn't do

Choi plays Giho, a 37-year veteran worker who joins Utututu as a silver intern, and his approach on set left Han visibly affected. "He was the first to arrive and the last to leave every single day," she said. "And he never once tried to teach me anything."

That restraint was the lesson. Choi didn't tell her how to play Seon-woo. When she had a question or was going in a direction he thought was off, he would ask a question back, nothing more. "He let me be Seon-woo as I understood her," Han said. "He respected my interpretation, even when I was getting it wrong."

She described him as "a mountain you can never climb over" in terms of craft, but also as someone with an almost boyish energy on set, "lovely and a bit like a kid, and then also solitary and a little lonely." Watching him, she said, made her want to live differently. "I want to be the kind of person who can genuinely treat another person as a person. Not as a junior, not as someone to instruct."

Her own definition of a good adult has shifted. "A good adult isn't someone who gives advice. It's someone who lives their own life so fully that others look at them and think, I want to be like that." She added, with a smile, that she tries not to give life advice at all. "It feels arrogant. Their life and mine are completely different."

The parts that required an apology

The film has a lighter register than anything Han has done recently. Seon-woo dances to aespa's Whiplash and sings In Soon-i's classic song Goose's Dream on camera. "I worked really hard on that singing," Han said, laughing. "And then I watched the finished film and I could not keep my eyes open. aespa fans, In Soon-i sunbaenim, I'm so sorry."

For what it's worth, Choi Min-sik told her she had "given her life" to it. She seemed to take the compliment.

Han is also quick to flag what the Korean remake changed from the original. The ending is entirely new, and she says it was the first thing that made her fall for the script. "When I read it for the first time, the ending was so good. I felt like it finally gave Seon-woo room to grow."

What comes next

Her next project after The Intern is a Netflix series adaptation of the global webtoon Solo Leveling, for which she has already bleached her hair for the role. She didn't say much more than that, other than that she wants to keep showing different sides.

"I hope I get many more chances to show different things," she said. "To make that happen, I'm managing my health carefully."

The Intern opens in Korean theaters on the 16th.