Pachinko’s Star and Showrunner on Season Two’s Big Reveal

The secret at the center of Pachinko had been slowly built up over two seasons. It finally broke open during the show’s second-season finale—to devastating results.

Based on the 2017 novel by Min Jin Lee, Pachinko follows Sunja, who, in 1931, leaves her home country of Korea (which is then under Japanese rule) to move to Osaka. There, she’s met with difficulties and discrimination as she tries to make a better life for herself after marrying the minister Baek Isak. [Spoilers from the show’s second-season finale, which debuted on Apple TV+ on October 11, below.]

Season two finds Sunja (played by Minha Kim) raising two sons, Noa and Mozasu, alone after her husband, Isak (Steve Sanghyun Noh), has been detained for political activities. But she has never revealed to Noa that Isak is not his biological father: Noa is really the son of Koh Hansu (Lee Min-ho), a wealthy married man with whom Sunja had an affair back in Korea. Hansu has remained in their lives, and has helped protect Sunja’s family and support Noa as the boy pursues a better life.

When Noa (Kang Tae Joo) is in college, he often goes to have dinner with Hansu, whom he considers to be a family friend. But in the season finale, Noa’s girlfriend surprises him by dropping by Hansu’s home. There, she tells Noa that it’s obvious that Hansu is his father, and Noa falls into despair. He returns home to see Sunja, but doesn’t tell her what he knows—he simply visits her for a short time before planning to disappear from her life forever. “I always feel like the end of coming of age is when you realize your parents are human beings—that’s when you know you’ve grown up,” showrunner Soo Hugh tells Vanity Fair. “And it felt like this was the end of his boyhood.”

Noa (right) confronts Hansu about their relationship in the final episode of season two.

Russ Martin

Hugh says she knew from early on that she would end season two with this revelation, and worked backwards from it while writing it. That goodbye scene was an emotional journey for Kim, who has been playing Sunja since Pachinko’s first season. “It’s the only thing that Sunja is always aware of: that Noa’s going to know it. That’s the thing that she’s very, very afraid of,” says Kim, who tapped into that fear for the scene with Noa.

In the novel version of Pachinko, Noa confronts Sunja first about the secret. On the series, though, Hugh preferred that he confront Hansu, and choose to instead give a gentler goodbye to his mother. “What I love about what Minha and Tae Joo did is that it’s the sweetest scene,” says Hugh. “In some ways, he loves her so much, and I think we all felt really chilled after that scene, because it felt so sad.”

After her visit from Noa, Sunja goes to see Hansu. That’s when they realize that Noa has disappeared, and Sunja begins falling apart over the idea that she may have lost her son forever because of her own choices. “Soo and I talk about it a lot, and that’s the point where the audience can see the Sunja that they didn’t see before. She’s going crazy—she’s just losing her control,” says Kim.

Sunja returns home to tell the rest of her family that Noa is really gone. She walks into her bedroom, falls down in her bed, and the camera focuses on her face as her eyes close. At first, Kim wasn’t sure that’s how Sunja would authentically react after discovering Noa had disappeared. “To be really honest, I quite couldn’t understand why she would finally feel exhausted…. I was like, ‘Really? Is that the emotion that she felt?’ Kim says, “But Noa, Mozasu, and her family [were] the only reason she could live on. So when she finally lies down, I could feel my body getting very heavy, and my eyes just closed.”

Kim says she almost fell asleep while filming that scene. “I was quite exhausted. That’s the weight of the one who’s carrying their family. She’s exhausted but trying to not to fall apart,” she says. “She’s trying really, really hard to not collapse.”

The show’s second season ends with Noa making his way to Nagano, where he seeks employment at a pachinko parlor after taking on a new Japanese name and denying that he’s Korean. A haunting version of Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” plays over the end credits. Hugh always wanted the song there, but she found the original Coldplay version too distracting. “We put in hundreds of other songs, so many other songs, but I kept returning back to the Coldplay song,” she says. So instead, she asked Rosé from Blackpink to record a cover. “I was like, ‘She’s never going to do it. Why would she do this?’” But the pop star agreed, and sent in an a cappella version that Hugh calls “amazing.”

With Pachinko’s second season wrapped, Hugh stands by her plans to conclude the adaptation in three seasons, but nothing has been officially greenlit yet. “It just comes down to that fate,” she says. “It’s like the pachinko game—we’re waiting for the pachinko game to either say we won or we lost. And the world is very, very different from when we first aired, so I think we just really hope the audience finds us.”

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