<i>Pachinko</i>'s Jin Ha on Why Playing Solomon Is the Hardest Job He's Ever Had (2024)

Actor Jin Ha sees his character in Pachinko as a version of himself in "an alternate universe."

"I often felt like Solomon was me, in an alternate universe where I did not find acting as a passion," Ha tells Town & Country. "I was considering finance very seriously in the middle of college as a career path. I remember preparing for the role like, oh, this is the way that he's emotionally blocked and walled off; [Solomon] has many very well crafted and thick masks that he has available to him in all these different social contexts—that would be me if my job weren't literally to empathize and open myself up to emotional investigation. One of my angles into Solomon is as just another side of the coin of myself."

Over the course of Panchinko, which adapts the sprawling multi-generational story of Min Jin Lee's best-selling book of the same name for the small screen, Ha's character Solomon grapples with his ambitions and his family's history to figure out what he wants to do with his life. He realizes over the course of the eight episodes he no longer wants to work for a bank, and starts to understand the sacrifices his grandmother, Sunja (Youn Yuh-jung) has made. As Solomon goes on a journey of self-discovery, Pachinko also follows Sunja's odyssey from Korea to Japan, and her life as a Zainichi Korean—an ethnic Korean living in Japan. Both storylines are told with vivid, heart-wrenching detail.

Ha brings a part of himself to every job he's taken on—from Aaron Burr in the Broadway production of Hamilton to Jamie in Devs, a Hulu thriller. "There are so few roles in the Western theatrical canon written for me, I was always sort of fitting my square block into star shaped holes," he explains. "I got used to having to broaden my own experience."

When he first found out he landed the role of Solomon, Ha texted Steven Yeun, a fellow Korean American actor who has starred in The Walking Dead and the Oscar-nominated film Minari, among other projects. The two are part of what Ha describes as a small group of friends of Asian American creatives, a cohort that has been an "incredible source of healing for me in the past several years."

Ha told Yeun, "I’m going to work with YJ!" referring to Youn Yuh-jung, who plays Solomon's grandmother, and who starred as Yeun's character's mother-in-law in Minari. He recalls Yeun wrote back, “Amazing, congratulations," and "She is Korea. Learn from her." Ha soon realized how incredible it was to share scenes with the legendary Oscar winner: "Every time I got to work with her, it felt like I was getting an incredibly intimate masterclass of ease, of simplicity, of stillness and depth in performance."

He describes working with Yuh-jung, and the other Asian actors on the show, as an "oceanic feeling"—a term coined by French essayist Romain Rolland, meaning a feeling of "being one with the external world." The experience of being part of a show that speaks to his own heritage and identity, and of sharing a story that has rarely been told on any screen or stage, has been revelatory for Ha.

"As an Asian American, Korean American man, immigrant in this industry, I have to explain myself a lot, which can feel soul crushing," he says. But, that didn't happen on the set of Pachinko. The majority of the show's cast is Korean, Japanese, and Asian American, and "the story is about us," Ha says. "There's a multitude of different people who are all three dimensional and have different wants and needs and desires."

That three-dimensional nature of Asian characters "doesn't happen that often" in Hollywood, Ha explains—and, for him, representation is about so much more than just seeing someone who looks like you on screen. "I wish for our humanity to become a given," Ha says. "I don't know if that's attainable in this world. But I'm happy with the pursuit of it."

Solomon was "the hardest, and yet the most fulfilling" role he’s ever performed. The difficulty of the role was in part due to the Apple TV+ miniseries being a trilingual show. Ha's character—a Korean man born in Osaka, Japan, and educated in the United States—has to speak all three languages—English, Korean, and Japanese—fluently.

When he first heard of Pachinko, Ha recalls the "quiet concern" he had in the back of his mind, a fear they would do some "nondescript, generic accented English" to indicate they're not speaking English, or that the creators would not take the necessary care to tell this painful history.

"There are ways to tell traumatic histories or traumatic periods in a family's history or countries’ history that can seem incredibly exploitative or, if I may use an extreme word, even fetishizing," Ha says. "Unfortunately, sometimes that comes from the creators not having a personal stake in the story that's being told, or the [country's] history that's being presented."

Yet once he started actually working on the series, there was never a concern about language or storytelling. "It felt very much my questions and concerns were always considered and taken care of," he says. "And there were always discussions had. Because we all shared this collective mission and goal of: how can we lift our community?"

In fact, Ha has noticed a shift toward "linguistically authentic" content in recent years, and an upwards trend in non-English language content made for American audiences. Pachinko, he says, "is not an exception at all. We are standing on some incredibly strong and resilient and impressive shoulders." (As Parasite director Bong Joon Ho famously said in his Oscars acceptance speech in 2020, "Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.")

In Pachinko, Solomon often switches from Japanese to Korean in the middle of a sentence, and his dialect changes depending on the situation. Working with a coach, Yumi King, Ha learned Japanese, and to speak Korean with a Japanese accent—because Solomon, unlike Ha, grew up in Japan.

Often, how Solomon expresses himself, and in which language, is as significant as the words he's actually saying. "Why does he speak certain words in Korean versus certain words in Japanese?" Ha says, revealing how he searched for emotional subtext within the script.

"It felt a lot like Shakespeare in terms of lines that are in prose versus verse; sometimes it's why a character or a scene switches from prose to verse that is the most important detail."

Ha has previously worked exclusively on English-language projects; Pachinko was the first project he's been a part of where his relatives who speak Korean—his extended family is all Korean—will be able to understand most of it. His dad, who speaks Korean, Japanese, and English, will be able to understand all of the show.

"I don't know what else there is in life," Ha says, happily. "I couldn't have asked for a project this personal, or this meaningful to have come into my life at this point. I'm really grateful for that."

The very last moments of Pachinko pull you out of the story. Instead of closing on a shot of young Sunja (Minha Kim) selling kimchi at the market in Osaka, Japan, the show fades to black, and text appears, which reads: "Over 2 million Koreans moved to Japan during colonial rule. About 800,000 of them were brought over by the Japanese government as laborers. The majority returned to their homeland at the end of WWII. But about 600,000 remained and became a stateless people. These are some of these women's stories."

And then, interview clips of Zainichi women in 2021 are interwoven together reminding the viewer of the real stakes of what what they just watched.

"For the audience, hopefully, it's a reminder that everything that you've witnessed up until this point is merely one story of these women—who are only a tiny, tiny group of this much larger demographic, [and] already a lot of them passed away," Ha says, sharing that it's essential Pachinko centers its narrative on Zainichi Koreans, "to honor these women, to honor that generation."

He sees the the ending of the series as its thesis statement—and a meaningful interrogation of the power storytelling. "What else is there for us to make in art, but to tell stories that haven't been told yet?"

In the top image: Bode shirt ($1,800); Tiffany & Co. necklace ($14,500), signet ring ($3,000) and Schlumberger brooches (from $23,000); Chanel Fine Jewelry brooches; Bulgari ring ($6,760)

Photographed by Victoria Stevens; styled by Cat Pope; hair by Ro Morgan at the Wall Group; makeup by Claudia Lake for Chanel; nails by Shirley Cheng for Zoya.