The actor opens up about Dr. Park’s ethical lines and the threat posed by the entities.
Cinemax: What have we learned about the entities this season?
Hoon Lee: We understand that the entities are also in the dark about certain things, that they also don’t know what the future is. While we might be following Kyle’s story as a way in, we’re now dealing with this opposition that is highly fallible. He pulls entities out of bodies, and they are not, by any stretch, invulnerable creatures. That makes it much more interesting because now you are dealing with people who are coming from different perspectives. You start to really dig into the complex dynamics of people who want different things.
Cinemax: How would you explain the merge?
Hoon Lee: If you don’t think of these entities as people that have completely commandeered the host, which we know is not the case, the way I’ve been thinking about it is, “What if you woke up one day and didn’t realize you had partial amnesia? What if you woke up one day and suddenly you had access to a host of memories you never had before?” This wouldn’t change you as a person, but your relationships with people might change. Some people would look at that, and say, “This person is now augmented. That is not a diminished person.” So I think the question “What is in someone’s best interest?” starts to come up.
Dr. Park starts to straddle that line. He starts to address the more complex questions: “What does it mean to be a host? Is that necessarily a bad thing? Is it a bad thing for the entities? What do the entities stand to gain as their destiny approaches, and what do they stand to lose?” Dr. Park is an interesting person to me; he’s the lightning rod for these shifting perceptions of what it is the entities are actually doing.
Cinemax: What do you think the stakes are in all of this?
Hoon Lee: On the one hand, the stakes are very large. It’s on the level of a worldwide genocide, initiated by an outside force. That’s a massive, cosmic, high stakes problem.
But fundamentally, the story is about a broken man who was never allowed to have a family, who is losing the family he has. He will do anything he can to hold on to them. The presence of that larger issue is really about “physicalizing” the vast obstacle that he is up against.