Cha In-pyo plays mentor onstage, questions whether he is one offstage

Every night at curtain call, the flowers go to Cha In-pyo. Thirty-three years into an acting career that has made him one of the most recognizable faces in the country, that is simply how it works.

Lately, however, the flowers and cheers have started to bother him.

"I already have fans. When a show ends, I get piles of gifts and bouquets," Cha said at a press conference held Tuesday in a fourth-floor rehearsal room at NOL Theater Daehangno Woori Card Hall in central Seoul. "A lot of the young actors in the team don't. I feel bad about it, and I keep asking myself what I could do to change that."

It is a strange thing to hear from the man currently playing the lead role in "Dead Poets Society," which runs through Sept. 13. Cha plays John Keating, the English literature instructor who tells the boys of Welton Academy to seize the day and think for themselves.

Onstage he is the mentor, but offstage, at 59, he is not convinced he has earned the title.

"The adult I believe in is someone who doesn't take the whole harvest, who stands one step back and shares it with the people coming up," he said. "Working with all these young actors, I kept wondering, am I actually an adult here? What kind of senior am I to them?"

Face of an era

For Korean audiences of a certain age, Cha is less an actor than a coordinate.

He debuted in 1993 through broadcaster MBC's open casting call and became a phenomenon the following year with "Love in Your Arms" (1994), playing a saxophone-playing department store heir whose romance with a working-class co-worker made him one of the country's first small-screen heartthrobs. He married his co-star, actress Shin Ae-ra, in 1995.

Over three decades he moved into films like "Crossing" (2008) and "The Tower" (2012), built a long public record of humanitarian work, and, in his 50s, started over again as a novelist. He has published five novels; one, "Mermaid Hunt" (2022), won the newcomer prize at the Hwang Sun-won Literary Award.

That second act is precisely why the first play of his life arrived when it did. Scripts had come for years, he said, and always lost.

"I came up as a mainstream entertainer, so I chose the life inside the frame," he said. "What changed is that I scaled back that kind of work and started writing. I realized I didn't have to settle into one thing. This isn't a case of getting less afraid with age. If anything, I'm more afraid now."

Last one cast

He was also, by some distance, the last actor cast. The rest of the company was locked in late last year, selected from roughly 1,500 auditioning actors.

Cha's call came only in April, followed by two months of rehearsals six full days a week. He hesitated, then walked in to find performers decades younger already warmed up and working.

"I decided not to pour cold water on that," he said. "The young actors who went through that grind with me are the ones who put me on this stage."

The apprenticeship has been literal. Director Cho Kwang-hwa, he noticed, gave the young cast detailed, unsparing notes and told the veterans almost nothing beyond blocking, so Cha went and asked.

He also asked the younger actors how his performance was landing — they were baffled at first, then obliged. One night he blanked on a line and someone behind him fed it to him in a whisper. The word he had lost was "awake."

He is currently auditioning for his next role, he added, and failing.

"I keep getting rejected," he said, laughing.

Less advice than declaration

Keating in the film is in his early 30s, Cha noted, young enough to preach conviction he had not yet tested.

"I'm an old Keating," he said. "After 30 more years, I can say you don't necessarily have to smash the frame, but there are other options, so lift your head and look."

He is wary of aiming that at young Koreans without acknowledging who built the conditions they live in.

"The world people in their 20s are living in — those in their 50s and 60s made it," he said. "When I was that age, working hard was enough, and there was hope. It's harder now. I feel responsible, and sorry."

"Carpe diem" survives the apology, he argues, because it is not really counsel.

"It's less advice than a declaration. You can't choose the past and you can't choose the future. The present is the one thing you can choose. That sentence names exactly what a human being is able to do."

What he can do, he has decided, is smaller and more concrete than a message. He has invited every producer and director he knows to come watch the younger cast. He is considering running seminars for them.

Through organizations supporting children's homes and young adults aging out of state care, some 200 teenagers have been brought to the theater; several told him it was the first play they had ever seen.

"Look at it one way and being born as Cha In-pyo is its own kind of prison," he said. "The family, the circumstances, the boundary you're handed. I spent a lot of my life avoiding choices I didn't have to make, and I can barely remember those years. What I remember is quitting a job to audition, or writing a novel. Breaking the frame, over and over, turns out to be the substance of a life."

He is now adapting "Mermaid Hunt" into a play himself. He has no plans to appear in it.

"Dead Poets Society," the first officially licensed Korean production of Tom Schulman's stage adaptation of his Oscar-winning 1989 screenplay, runs through Sept. 13 at NOL Theater Daehangno Woori Card Hall.