In about one month, the project that Soo Hugh has been working on for the past four years will finally make its way into the world. So it’s a bit surprising that when Vanity Fair asks her about the release of her highly anticipated Pachinko drama series, the showrunner describes her general feeling as “bittersweet.”
“You would think I would be bursting with joy at this point, because it’s been four years, right?” she tells Vanity Fair. “But, when you’ve been holding something for that long, in some ways it’s almost like a child—am I ready to let this child go to college and live on its own and cook for itself?”
Hugh, whose previous work includes AMC’s The Terror and ABC’s The Whispers, has a deep emotional connection to Apple TV+’s big-budget adaption of Min Jin Lee’s sweeping 2017 best-selling novel, which debuts its first full trailer today.
As the trailer and the exclusive images debuting here at Vanity Fair show, it’s an epic and visually stunning tale following several generations of a Korean family, beginning with a young woman, Sunja, living in early 1900s Korea. Sunja becomes pregnant, but then discovers her lover is already married, so she chooses to marry another man and travel with him to Japan, all in hopes of creating a better life for her child.
“The book is amazing in terms of not only telling a character story, but also situating it within a historical context that doesn’t make it feel like you’re reading a textbook,” says Hugh of the story, which begins during the Japanese occupation of Korea. Those political tensions that affected the everyday life of Korean citizens play a key role in the story.
Though the series captures a specific setting and community, the multigeneration story line explores deep themes such as identity, acceptance, and responsibilities to one’s family and future generations. Hugh says one of the references for the show was another family saga, The Godfather. “The spotlight that I’m interested in is the question of survival, but at what cost?” she says. “When you are someone who grows up with no safety net, your choices and the ramifications of those choices are so different than those who do have that safety net. It tests all of our characters’ moral fortitude—yes, you can live, but how far are you willing to go?”
When Hugh first read the novel, she wasn’t quite sure how it could be adapted for television, because the story has such a large scope, set across multiple continents and time periods. “I didn’t want to do a Korean Masterpiece Theatre,” says Hugh. “I love Masterpiece Theatre, but I didn’t want it to feel like we were watching a period drama of a time and place that no one is familiar with. And so it wasn’t until I was like, Wait a minute. What if it wasn’t a period show all the way through?”
So she and the writers decided to go back and forth between Sunja’s story and that of her grandson Solomon, who is working for an investment bank in Tokyo. “Sunja’s coming-of-age story line should, pace-wise, feel like lightning. But with Solomon’s story line, it’s over one year, with a deliberate pacing. So there’s not only tension between the story lines, but between past and present—this notion of one generation of burden and sacrifice for another. Even within the structure of the filmmaking, it feels as if the two were clashing at times.”
The show, produced by Media Res and Blue Marble Pictures, features recent Minari Oscar–winner Youn Yuh-jung as the older version of Sunja, and newcomer Minha Kim as the younger version, both of whom deliver emotionally deep work. Devs and Love Life star Jin Ha plays Solomon and the ensemble cast also includes well-known Korean actor Lee Minho and F9 actor Anna Sawai.
It took six to seven months to cast the main actors, with a worldwide search. Hugh and her team had an additional challenge when casting the project because she says auditions are not a standard practice in Korea, and she was asking all her actors to audition for their roles. “It’s not because I don’t think the actors are talented—they’re brilliant actors. But to me, the success of a show is chemistry.”
The toughest role to cast was that of the teenage Sunja. “With Sunja, who’s the heroine of our show, we’ve met so many amazing actresses, saw hundreds of tapes, but we didn’t have her.” But after seeing Kim on tape, Hugh had her come in to audition. “She just has an authenticity—and I don’t mean ‘authenticity’ like she looks like she’s from the 1930s—but there is innately in her this just timeless quality.”
With an eye toward telling this story authentically, Hugh also brought in two Korean American directors, Kogonada, who helmed 2017’s Columbus and the new film After Yang, and Justin Chon, who directed Gook and Blue Bayou. “They’re very, very different filmmakers, and that’s what was so exciting to me,” she says. “Now the question is, were they specifically spotlighted because they were Korean? And the answer is yes and no. Meaning, it’s not that I believe that only Koreans can tell the story, but I think, if you’re Korean you’d understand the heart of the stories differently than a non-Korean.”
Hugh, who is Korean American, reveals that there was going to be a third director, Iranian American filmmaker Ramin Bahrani, who helmed The White Tiger, but she says the pandemic got in the way. “Ramin is not Korean, and he was going to direct a few episodes, and he’s an immigrant,” she says. “And so, I thought that that was also a really important lens for this.”
When the eight-episode first season debuts in March, Pachinko could break through one of the remaining barriers in the American TV space as a show told mostly in a foreign language and starring an almost all Asian cast (of the 637 cast members, 95% are Asian). Hugh says it was a requirement from day one that all the characters would be speaking in their native language, and there was never a conversation about having the characters speak English to make it more accessible for viewers. And while we’ve seen progress in the acceptance and honoring of international films (best-picture-winner Parasite) over the past few years, there has yet to be a foreign-language TV series that’s been nominated in the drama-series category at the Emmys, though Netflix’s Squid Game also could be a likely contender this year. “It’s not the easiest show. Not just because of the language component or the period aspect, but it’s a very deliberate show in a sense that we sort of have to wait a few episodes to get the whole full circle of a story,” says Hugh. “Will that work? Will an audience accept it? Are we going to be marginalized to foreign content or can we really be embraced as a global show?”
Hugh, who adds that the plan is for the series to run for four seasons, feels the responsibility of shepherding a barrier-breaking show and what it could mean if it fails after its debut, not just for the future of this series, but for the fact that it means other shows like this one could lose out on the opportunity to be made. “I wish I could say that it was just a question for Pachinko to bear, but just because we are on the vanguard of this, I feel a lot of responsibility, of not wanting to be the show that sunk it all for a while.”
For Hugh and the team behind Pachinko, the wait is nearly over.
Pachinko premieres March 25 on Apple TV+ with the first three episodes, followed by new weekly installments each Friday during its eight-episode season through April 29. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive spring TV coverage, featuring first looks and in-depth interviews with some of this coming season’s biggest contenders.
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