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Park Ji-hoon: The eyes, the king and the man

Published: 20 Feb. 2026, 00:05

Lee Yoon-jung

The author is a culture columnist.

After watching “The King and the Man,” I found myself wanting to visit Cheongnyeongpo in Yeongwol, Gangwon — the secluded riverside site where King Danjong was exiled. Online, I saw that long lines had already formed for the ferry to the island. The film has drawn more than four million viewers to theaters. Most who have seen it speak of one thing: Park Ji-hoon’s eyes.

″The King's Warden″ still [SHOWBOX]

It is not difficult to imagine that those eyes opened hearts and set people in motion.

The tragedy of King Danjong is a story Koreans already know well. The direction is not especially ornate. Yet audiences wept in packed theaters. I did too. The moment Park first appeared on screen, something in my chest simply thudded. Any premature assumption that a young actor would carry the film on a single register of sorrow vanished. His finely controlled eyelids and pupils conveyed, even in the shadow of impending death, flickers of small joy, flashes of anger and tremors of tenderness. The emotional depth in his gaze remained consistent throughout, never once seeming false. So this is what an actor is, I found myself thinking.

Veteran actor Yoo Hae-jin said in an interview that the emotion came to him the instant he looked into Park’s eyes. Coming from an actor with decades of experience, it did not sound like flattery. In the film, Eom Heung-do (played by Yoo) risks his life to care for the deposed king. Was it lofty loyalty? The film suggests otherwise. It is in the gaze of a 17-year-old boy — not regal authority, not melodramatic exaggeration, but barely concealed fear and indignation — that the answer lies. Any human confronted with that look, one imagines, would find it impossible to turn away. That gaze awakens Eom’s tenderness. When the boy says he does not want to die at the hands of “those men,” Eom cannot abandon him, even at the risk of being branded a traitor. That tenderness has survived more than 500 years to move us still.

Those who remember Park as Yeon Si-eun in the drama “Weak Hero Class 1” may have sensed it already: this actor’s eyes are not ordinary. But that assessment may have carried a qualifier — impressive “for an idol-turned-actor.” “The King and the Man” strips that caveat away. Viewers have described him as an actor with jewels in his eyes. Many have celebrated the emergence of a new leading figure for his generation.

Still from historical film ″The King's Warden″ [SHOWBOX]

The eyes are the core instrument of emotional transmission. In the silent film era, when actors had no voices, directors moved the camera in close. Without dialogue, the gaze carried everything. As “The Passion of Joan of Arc” (1928) so memorably demonstrated, a single eyelid or the slightest tremor of the pupil could communicate more than a line of speech. Modern eye-tracking studies confirm as much: when audiences look at faces on screen, their gaze lingers longest on the eyes. Instinctively, we search there for truth.

It is also in the eyes that faces generated by artificial intelligence are first exposed. The human eye appears still when it fixes on something, but in reality it vibrates microscopically, beyond conscious control. AI smooths away that disorderly tremor. The very flawlessness of the result betrays it as false. A century ago, directors pressed the camera toward the face. Today, researchers detect deepfakes by examining the eyes. The principle is the same. Eyes without a mind are eventually revealed by viewers whose own eyes do have one.

What Park Ji-hoon conveys exceeds physiology. His gaze has forged an unusually sturdy thread of empathy between a lonely boy who died five centuries ago and audiences today. One viewer wrote online that Danjong, denied the love of parents and subjects alike, had finally been resurrected. Some have criticized the film’s rough direction. Yet director Chang Hang-jun may have accomplished more than half of his task simply by casting Park. Audiences surrendered not to polished mise-en-scène but to the most elemental cinematic truth: the actor’s eyes.

Behind-the-scene still from film ″The King's Warden″ [SHOWBOX]

Film is the art of the director and the script. But it is ultimately completed through performance. And performance, in the end, is completed in the eyes. The heart opens first there, and through that door we willingly walk into another’s suffering and joy. Park Ji-hoon has reminded us what an actor can do.

This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.