Park Chan-wook doesn’t really know the way Robert Downey Jr. responded to his characters in “The Sympathizer.”
The acclaimed Korean director labored with Downey for the primary time whereas adapting Viet Thanh Nguyen’s bestselling novel for HBO, and he anticipated a big-name star at that stage to tug out the negotiation course of after getting a proposal. To Park’s shock, Downey circled again shortly, and the 2 of them began to dig into his character — his characters.
Downey, who additionally govt produced the collection together with spouse Susan, performs 4 characters (to this point) within the restricted collection, every with a novel look and voice and motivations — all of which had been in-built course of. There’s C.I.A. agent Claude, the Orientalist Professor Hammer, filmmaker Niko, and Congressman Ned Godwin, and Downey seems to totally get pleasure from embodying each single one. In his evaluation of the collection, IndieWire’s Ben Travers wrote that “there’s a comic book high quality to Downey’s depictions that successfully conveys the twisted worldview and weird nature of his characters.”
“We had a complete lot of conversations ranging from, the place are these characters from?,” Park instructed IndieWire over Zoom by way of translator. “What faculty do you suppose they might have attended, or what sort of costume do you suppose they might have worn?”
Each element, from the broad idea to the extent of a personality’s nostril or ears, was mentioned, and knowledgeable by Danny Glicker’s costuming and prosthetic designer Vincent Van Dyke.
“Proper earlier than we kicked into manufacturing, we went to Vincent’s studio, and he had a collection of clay busts in entrance of us,” Park recalled. “As Robert and I’d throw out these concepts, on the spot he would carve out or put extra clay onto these busts. It was very thrilling second to me; I distinctly keep in mind that second.”
As he continued to put in writing and map out the remainder of the collection, Park got here again to the scene on the finish of Episode 3, “Love It or Go away It,” when the Captain (Hoa Xuande) meets with all 4 of those key American figures in his life at a restaurant. The digital camera pans between Downey’s characters as they sit at a spherical desk, reducing again to the Captain as he soaks all of it in, these homogenous, highly effective figures who maintain his destiny in his palms whereas he too might betray them at any second. At the same time as they share the desk, the boys are sometimes in their very own worlds, embodying American vanity (and later, debauchery).
“That’s really the second the place I considered having one man or one actor play these a number of characters,” Park stated. “After I considered adapting this unique novel, and after I considered this steakhouse second notably, that’s really the second that I believed, ‘Effectively, these guys are literally one and the identical.’ I felt like that was really our unique novelist’s intention, whether or not or not he had meant to try this, or whether or not he did that with out figuring out. These 4 faces are literally one and the identical, representing the large thought of America.”
“The Sympathizer” airs Sundays on HBO.