Key Takeaways
Actor Park Yun-ho said his role in the Netflix series Rat was defined by pressure, because he had to carry a major twist in the story.
He played Seo Yoo-min, a character who steals another man's name and identity while also being shaped by past loss.
Park says the challenge pushed him to keep taking on new projects, including the upcoming TVing series Proxy College Entrance Exam.
For actor Park Yun-ho, Rat was not the kind of project that could be approached lightly. He had to play Seo Yoo-min, the person at the center of the drama's twist, and that character had to share a face with Je Moon-jae, played by Ryu Jun-yeol.
In a twist-driven story, the hardest job is often not the hero's. It belongs to the character who must hold the secret until the final reveal and still keep the audience invested.
That was the weight Park kept returning to in the interview: it was stressful, heavy, and demanding, which made him even more cautious.
The burden of carrying the twist
Rat is a Netflix series adapted from a webtoon of the same name. The story follows Je Moon-jae, a reclusive novelist whose life is stolen by someone with the same name and face, along with a moneylender chasing missing funds and a detective pulled into the case. Park's Seo Yoo-min is both the villain who takes Je Moon-jae's life and a victim who had once lost everything himself.
That makes the role more complicated than it first appears. Park had to suggest cruelty and loss at the same time. It is easy to understand why he called it a role that came with only pressure. He had to push through extreme emotions repeatedly, and scenes opposite Ryu Jun-yeol felt especially daunting. Playing a central figure in a twist narrative is not just about hiding the truth; it is about holding the story together after the truth comes out.
Park said he even hid his casting from his parents until the series was released. The power of a twist often depends on controlling what is known in advance, which means both the production team and the actors have to stay quiet. Park accepted that silence, too. After release, he said comments such as “You must have worked hard” were a bigger comfort than praise alone, because they felt like recognition of the effort behind the performance.
Making two characters feel like one face
Seo Yoo-min is written as a character who undergoes multiple cosmetic surgeries and ends up with the same face as Je Moon-jae. Park therefore had to do more than imitate Ryu Jun-yeol; he had to absorb the texture of another actor's character work into his own. To prepare, he studied Ryu's films Believer and Money, looking for a lighter, more relaxed tone and a kind of looseness in behavior.
Park said he wanted there to be moments where the two performances almost overlapped. He also spoke with Ryu before filming and received help on set. Watching Ryu work closely was, for him, a lesson in how a character can be made to feel alive beyond the script. Small things such as how casually a character grabs someone by the collar or drinks a beer can seem minor, but in practice they shape the pulse of a role.
The fear in Rat does not come from action scenes or bloodshed so much as from identity theft. A setting in which someone cannot prove who they are even after verifying fingerprints at a local administrative office shows how fragile legal and social identity can be. Park said that simply reading the script made him feel uneasy. What seems impossible in ordinary life becomes frighteningly plausible inside the story.
What a twist drama asks of an actor
People often think a twist-heavy project is decided at the end. In reality, the middle is harder. The audience has to believe in the character long enough to keep suspending disbelief. Park's job in Rat was to occupy that trust zone. If Seo Yoo-min had felt like a one-note villain, the twist would have lost force. If he had seemed too sympathetic too early, the tension would have weakened.
That is why the performance needed duality. Seo Yoo-min had to carry the coldness of someone who stole another man's identity and the pain of someone who had once been robbed of his own life. Roles like this are less about explosive emotion than about keeping the balance visible in small expressions and gestures. Park's comments about learning Ryu's sense of ease fit that idea well. Strong emotion is not always delivered through harder lines; it often emerges through silence, movement, and the length of a glance.
Identity as a fragile thing
The series feels unsettling because it touches something rooted in everyday life. People usually believe identity is secured by documents, fingerprints, and a face. Rat shows how easily that belief can be shaken. If a face can be altered and records can be copied, what is left? In the end, the answer is speech, behavior, and the memories of others.
That question feels timely. Technology that can mimic a person from a photo or a voice note is spreading quickly, and impersonation scams are becoming more sophisticated. Park said the scenario seemed impossible in common sense terms, but the world is moving toward a place where such impossibility looks less impossible. In that sense, the show's fear reads less like fantasy and more like a warning. Identity may seem solid, but it can depend on social systems and other people's memories more than we like to admit.
Park's work, then, is not just genre acting. He is the actor who delivers the twist, but also the one who moves through the anxiety of identity loss with his body. That may be why comments about how hard he worked stayed with him after the show. Audiences remember the twist, but good actors make them remember the burden that made the twist possible.
The next face Park Yun-ho wants to show
Park is already preparing for what comes next. The TVing series Proxy College Entrance Exam is scheduled to air within the year, and several other projects are in the works. He said he always wants to show fans something new and keep taking on different challenges. That sounds less like a slogan than a deliberate attempt to stop his image from hardening too early.
His interest in historical dramas is especially telling. Moving from school stories, thrillers, and romantic comedies to a historical series means widening not only genre range but also the generations who might watch. He said he still remembers watching the historical drama Queen Seondeok with his parents at home, and he hopes to appear in a work that families can watch together in the same way.
Park is still young, which means more tests are ahead. But Rat made one thing clear: he is becoming an actor who can carry not only the scene itself, but also the pressure beneath it. Viewers often look for the next face. Park Yun-ho may be building toward a career where that next face is exactly what keeps them watching.
