Why Pachinko Showcases Lee Min-ho’s Boldest Performance Yet

As Koh Hansu, Lee Min-ho uses the charisma that made him a Hallyu icon while abandoning the safety of a conventional romantic hero.

For more than a decade, Lee Min-ho has been one of the most recognizable faces of Korean television. “Boys Over Flowers,” “The Heirs,” “The Legend of the Blue Sea” and “The King: Eternal Monarch” turned him into an international star whose screen presence could carry a drama across borders.

Those performances established his particular strengths. Lee could command attention without forcing it, make an emotionally guarded character feel romantic and communicate affection through posture, expression and silence. Yet “Pachinko” asked him to use those qualities in a fundamentally different way.

As Koh Hansu, Lee is still magnetic, elegantly dressed and capable of taking control of almost any room. This time, however, his charisma is not a promise that the character will ultimately become a trustworthy romantic lead. It is part of what makes Hansu dangerous.

That tension is the strongest reason “Pachinko” deserves to be considered one of Lee Min-ho’s best performances. The series does not reject the qualities that made him famous. It transforms them into the foundation of a morally complicated character who can be protective and possessive, vulnerable and ruthless, loving and destructive without fitting neatly into the category of hero or villain.

Why Pachinko may be Lee Min-ho’s best performance yet / Apple TV

Hansu is not designed to be easily loved

When Hansu arrives at the fish market in Japanese-occupied Korea, he immediately appears different from everyone around him. His clothing, confidence and economic power separate him from the local merchants, while his ability to move between Korean and Japanese society gives him an authority that young Sunja, played by Minha Kim, has never encountered.

Their relationship begins with attraction, but the imbalance between them soon becomes impossible to ignore. Hansu is older, wealthier, more experienced and already married. After Sunja becomes pregnant, he offers to support her as his mistress rather than build the honest family life she expected. She refuses him and later marries Isak, the compassionate minister played by Steve Sanghyun Noh.

A less ambitious production might have softened Hansu into a misunderstood romantic hero simply because Lee Min-ho was playing him. “Pachinko” does not do that. Hansu’s continued attachment to Sunja never erases the deception, control or entitlement that defined their early relationship.

Lee also avoids reducing him to a conventional villain. He does not ask viewers to excuse Hansu, but he allows them to understand how the character justifies his own behavior. Hansu genuinely believes that money, influence and protection give him the right to remain involved in Sunja’s life, even when she has rejected the future he offered her.

The performance works because Lee plays Hansu’s love and selfishness as simultaneous truths. His feelings may be sincere, but sincerity does not automatically make his actions fair.

Lee Min-ho had to earn the role through an audition

Lee’s casting story reflects how different “Pachinko” was from the star-led Korean dramas typically associated with him.

Despite his established career, he went through a formal audition process for the first time in more than a decade. Lee said the experience reminded him that an audition is not only a demonstration of acting ability, but also a process of determining whether an actor’s interpretation and personal qualities match a character.

Series creator Soo Hugh has explained that Lee was subjected to the same rigorous process as the other actors. Performers were required to prepare several substantial scenes, allowing the creative team to examine how deeply each person had considered the role.

That process matters when evaluating the final performance. Lee was not included simply to provide an internationally recognizable name. He actively pursued Hansu and entered a production in which his celebrity status did not guarantee him the part.

The choice also involved an element of professional risk. Hansu lacks the moral certainty and reassuring romantic arc that viewers might expect from a Lee Min-ho character. The role required him to trust an ensemble drama in which he would disappear for stretches of the story, support Sunja’s larger journey and sometimes leave audiences deeply uncomfortable.

For an actor already capable of choosing projects built entirely around his star image, accepting those conditions showed a desire to be tested.

Why Pachinko may be Lee Min-ho’s best performance yet / Apple TV

Chapter Seven reveals a version of Lee audiences had rarely seen

The clearest evidence for the strength of Lee’s performance arrives in the first season’s seventh episode, which shifts away from Sunja’s story to reveal Hansu’s youth in Yokohama.

This history was substantially created for the television adaptation and does not appear in the same form in Min Jin Lee’s original novel. Set around the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, the episode follows a younger Hansu before he acquires the wealth, control and emotional armor seen in the rest of the series.

At that point, Hansu is working as a tutor for an American family and appears to have a possible path out of his precarious life. He is intelligent, hopeful and occasionally awkward, with ambitions that feel far removed from the calculating man he later becomes.

The earthquake destroys that possibility. The disaster killed more than 100,000 people and was followed by the massacre of Koreans who were falsely blamed for poisoning wells and causing unrest. Within the series, Hansu witnesses destruction, racial violence and personal loss in rapid succession.

Lee carries almost the entire episode, and the transformation depends less on dramatic speeches than on his physical response to terror. The controlled gaze associated with the adult Hansu disappears. His breathing changes, his body becomes reactive and his face registers the confusion of a young man realizing that intelligence and good intentions cannot protect him from history.

By the end, the audience can recognize the emotional origin of the older Hansu’s obsession with survival. The episode does not suggest that trauma excuses everything he later does, but it demonstrates how fear hardened into a worldview in which power and money became the only forms of security he trusted.

Lee described feeling considerable pressure because the episode departed from the main family narrative and rested heavily on his character. The result became one of the first season’s most widely discussed installments, with major publications highlighting both the historical subject and Lee’s performance.

The role requires more restraint than his earlier leading characters

Many of Lee’s most popular characters express power openly. Gu Jun-pyo in “Boys Over Flowers” is emotionally explosive, Kim Tan in “The Heirs” places his romantic conflict at the center of his identity, and Lee Gon in “The King: Eternal Monarch” carries the formal confidence of a monarch.

Hansu is more difficult to read. His power is communicated through stillness, observation and the certainty that other people will respond when he speaks. Lee frequently allows pauses, small changes in his eyes and controlled movements to carry information that the dialogue leaves unsaid.

This is especially effective in Hansu’s scenes with Sunja. He can appear emotionally exposed for a moment, only to recover his authority when he realizes that vulnerability has not given him the response he wanted. His affection often turns into frustration because he cannot understand why the material security he offers fails to win Sunja’s loyalty.

Lee’s performance becomes stronger when Hansu is silent because the viewer must decide whether he is observing, calculating, remembering or suppressing an emotional reaction. The uncertainty suits a character who has survived by rarely revealing his complete intentions.

Even Hansu’s clothing contributes to the performance. His sharply tailored suits visually separate him from Sunja’s world, but Lee wears them less as decoration than as armor. The adult Hansu has constructed every element of his appearance to communicate that he will never again be the powerless young Korean seen in Yokohama.

Acting across languages adds another layer to Hansu

“Pachinko” is told in Korean, Japanese and English, with language functioning as part of the characters’ identities rather than merely as a practical feature of an international production.

Lee has spoken about the difficulty of expressing emotion while working from dialogue written in another language. For Hansu, however, multilingualism is essential. His movement between Korean and Japanese reflects his ability to survive between communities, but it also shows that he is never completely free from the colonial hierarchy surrounding him.

Hansu can communicate with powerful Japanese figures and operate within their economic system, yet his Korean identity continues to shape how others view him. His language, clothing and manner may provide access, but they cannot erase the prejudice that influenced his early life.

Lee therefore has to adjust more than pronunciation. Hansu’s behavior changes depending on whom he is addressing, what language he is using and how much power he holds in that particular exchange. The performance presents code-switching as a survival strategy developed long before the term became widely used.

Season Two makes Hansu even harder to categorize

The second season, set partly in wartime Osaka in 1945, expands Hansu’s role from Sunja’s former lover to an increasingly influential presence in the lives of her children.

He uses his connections to move Sunja’s family away from the city before the American bombing, protecting them from immediate danger. Yet the same intervention also brings him closer to Noa, the son who does not initially know Hansu is his biological father.

Lee described the second-season Hansu as more evolved but also more consumed by desire. He compared the character’s momentum to a bullet train moving at full speed, driven by what Hansu considers the most efficient way to protect the people he regards as his family.

That interpretation is crucial. Hansu does not think of himself as a cruel man interfering in other people’s lives. He thinks of himself as the only person willing and able to make the decisions necessary for their survival.

Soo Hugh praised Lee for bringing vulnerability to Hansu in the second season and said much of the character as he exists on screen was built through the actor’s work beyond the foundation of the scripts.

His most painful relationship eventually becomes the one with Noa. Hansu sees the boy’s intelligence and ambition as an extension of himself, but his attempts to shape Noa also reveal his inability to understand what his identity and criminal associations may mean to a son raised by another father.

Lee plays those scenes with pride, longing and control existing at the same time. Hansu wants recognition as Noa’s father, but he approaches fatherhood as another problem that can be solved through access, education and power. When emotional reality refuses to follow that logic, his authority begins to look tragically inadequate.

Pachinko uses Lee Min-ho’s stardom instead of being controlled by it

One reason the performance feels so significant is that “Pachinko” never stops Lee from looking like a star. It simply refuses to let star power determine the morality of the story.

His entrance carries glamour. His chemistry with Minha Kim is persuasive, and Hansu’s confidence makes him fascinating to watch. Those qualities help viewers understand why Sunja is initially drawn to him, but the series gradually asks the audience to examine the danger of confusing magnetism with goodness.

This is not a rejection of Lee’s romantic-drama career. On the contrary, the performance is effective because he brings years of experience playing compelling, high-status men and then removes the guarantee that charm will lead to redemption.

Fans familiar with his earlier work can recognize the commanding presence that made him a Hallyu star, but “Pachinko” reveals what happens when that presence is applied to someone whose love can become possessive and whose protection comes with consequences.

Great acting does not require a likable character

Calling Hansu one of Lee Min-ho’s best performances does not mean treating Hansu as the ideal partner or secret hero of “Pachinko.” The series remains centered on Sunja and the generations shaped by her decisions, endurance and sacrifices.

Lee’s achievement is that Hansu can be understood without being absolved. Audiences can see the frightened young man created by colonial violence, the survivor who built power from that fear, the lover who never accepted rejection and the father who wants to protect his son but cannot separate protection from control.

Those contradictions give Lee more to play than a simple transformation from cold man to devoted romantic lead. Hansu does not become good once his trauma is revealed, and he does not lose all human feeling because he behaves selfishly. He remains unresolved.

“Pachinko” gave Lee Min-ho the opportunity to prove that the charisma behind his international fame could support a performance built on ambiguity, history and restraint. He responded by creating a character who is not always easy to admire but is almost impossible to ignore.

That is why Hansu may not be Lee Min-ho’s most lovable role, but it has a convincing claim to being his finest.