Revisiting Park Seo-joon’s Itaewon Class and Fight For My Way on his birthday: How he shone in the underdog tales

Nevertheless, Sae-royi assembles a motley crew of misfits and outcasts and begins his own restaurant chain. Among these is the sociopathic Yi-seo (Kim Da-mi) who falls deeply in love with him, while he remains perplexed about his own feelings towards her. In the first half of the show, the story sees the team struggling to work with each other, while battling ingrained prejudices and personal vendettas. Sae-royi works to keep his squabbling team together, but loses patience too. He’s almost too good to be true in some ways—except that you know he is more flawed than everyone else.

A still from Itaewon Class (Photo: Netflix)

Sae-royi has been one of Seo-joon’s most complex characters—a man repressing all his pent-up emotions behind a fragile mask, while making a herculean effort to seek vengeance in a ‘fair and just manner’. He doesn’t want blood; he just wants justice for himself, and his father. The cracks begin to appear slowly as this task takes a toll on him, perhaps more than he expected. In the final climactic episodes of the show, he addresses his real feelings while his father watches him quietly. We see the real broken and battered Sae-royi—a person he had hidden from everyone else, filled with emotional bruises and gashes.

Itaewon Class works well as an underdog story, for the most part that is before it becomes an unnecessary case of damsel in distress. However, before Itaewon Class, the classic inspirational tale, there was Fight for My Way. It was the story of four friends, played by Seo-joon, Kim Ji-won, Song Ha-yoon and Ahn Jae-hong, all on different paths as they struggle to fulfil their various dreams. Seo-joon plays the role of a former Taekwondo champion named Choi Dong-man, who has now lost his status and popularity after a series of disturbing events. Fight for My Way follows their hard and long journey to success, with Seo-joon and Kim Ji-won at the center. While Itaewon Class loses some of its emotional heft by the middle of the series, Fight for My Way kicks it up a notch and becomes far more engrossing. The romance between Dong-man and Choi Ae-ra is fresh, lively and organic and makes good use of the ‘best friends to lovers’ trope well. Neither of the characters become predictable or staid and maintains their own level of sass throughout.

Seo-joon’s portrayal of agony has always been searing. However, the most excruciating one would be in Fight for My Way, where he temporarily loses his sense of hearing after a brutal match. The frenzy, the dry screams and the panic of not being able to hear Choi Ae-ra speak is one of the best scenes in his career, beating even Itaewon Class.

Park Seo-joon’s attempts at experimentation always seem to land, even if the storytelling fails him sometimes. There’s another underdog tale on the way titled Dream, featuring him and IU. In this tale, Seo-joon plays the role of a professional soccer player, who becomes the coach of a rag-tag soccer team and leads them to a victory.