When Past Lives star Mr Teo Yoo moved to New York for the summer of 2002, he did so with the intention of returning home to Germany as soon as his three months of acting classes had finished. He remembers the day he decided that, firmly, that wouldn’t be the case. He called his father, telling him, “I’m sorry, this is the life that I’ve chosen,” and from that point forward, he abandoned the life he was supposed to live – becoming a physical therapist – in order to move deeper into the world of drama.

To act professionally, he says, was an unorthodox choice for a child of South Korean parents (his father was a miner, his mother a nurse) who’d moved to the suburbs of Cologne before he was born. But ever since his late teens, guided by his high-school teachers, he’d found solace in the stuff an athletic kid wasn’t supposed to. They taught him about Mr William Shakespeare; he discovered movies by Messrs Wong Kar-wai and Ang Lee. Somehow, he had an “instinctual understanding of that kind of cinematic grammar,” he says. Art was, in some ways, an opportunity to dig further into his interiority: “Those feelings of displacement and loneliness weren’t foreign to me.”

That summer, he trained at the renowned Lee Strasberg Institute under the tutelage of the late Ms Irma Sandrey, who worked with legends such as Mr Al Pacino. It helped Yoo learn so much about himself that the opportunities to become someone else became far more intriguing. He stayed put and graduated in 2004.

Most recently, Yoo became Hae Sung in Ms Celine Song’s directorial debut Past Lives. The film follows Nora (Ms Greta Lee), a South Korean emigrant to New York who connects with her childhood friend Hae Sung after decades apart. Both are wondering what could have come of their relationship had they not parted ways. Since its premiere at 2023’s Sundance Film Festival, the A24-supported film has become something of a revelation: a modestly sized movie with a soul so expansive and curious that it’s transformed into a big awards player. Yoo earnt a Best Actor nomination for this year’s Baftas, and the film will be a contender for two awards at the Oscars in March.

When we meet his character in the modern day, Hae Sung has fallen into the formal career and lifestyle that was expected of him. Meanwhile, Nora, a writer who moved continents, Anglicised her name, married an American, hasn’t. To play Hae Sung – a repressed and quiet person – Yoo went back to an old way of being.

“[Hae Sung] is very close to how a lot of Korean men live, because of a kind of herd mentality that stems out of Confucianism that’s still very prevalent in Korean culture,” he says. “I’m a way more natural and freer person than him – but having always moved around a lot, and feeling a little bit like an outsider and out of place, has given my life the emotional trajectory of melancholy.”

You can see it in the way Yoo plays Hae Sung in the film. His performance feels more like an act of excavation than an embellishment.

This thoughtful reading on the role and how Yoo plays it is not lost on the critics, who have called his performance “quietly heartbreaking” (NPR) and “nuanced and human” (Vanity Fair). However, you get the sense that the beauty of the film’s experience for Yoo lies less in the way it’s being received (“that is pretty overwhelming”) and more in the making of it. The first time Yoo read the script, he cried.

“We were aware that we had a very special [thing] on our hands,” he says. “I think all of us were at a point in our lives where we needed a script like this, to express a vulnerability [we were all] ready to show. There was a certain kind of feeling, an energy, where all of our lives collided into it.”

He calls Past Lives “a perfect little storm”.

The past few months have been startling for him, unlike anything he’s experienced thus far. He’s had an illustrious career in Korean film and television since moving to Seoul in 2007, both a work-related move and to follow his wife, the artist Ms Nikki Lee. But save for his appearance in 2018’s Leto, the audacious musical from Russian director Mr Kirill Serebrennikov, his most significant work has seldom stretched beyond the country’s borders. Now, thanks to awards season, he’s attending galas and ceremonies in the company of the Hollywood cognoscenti. And they recognise him.

“That’s not always a very comfortable time to talk deeply about work,” he says, jokingly. “But I was glad to meet Pedro Pascal and Keanu Reeves, and have been able to respectively talk with them about their work.”

He bashfully brushes it off, smiling. “But it was more kind of a fanboy moment rather than an exchange,” he says.

Yoo is trying to re-ground himself in Seoul right now. He’s slipping back into the rhythm of the city, climbing Bukhansan, the mountain that looms over it, and taking the time to read new scripts that are, he says, “of greater quality” than what he was met with before. There are still several things that will pull him back out of the country – he’s already been cast in the second season of Netflix thriller The Recruit. But he’s hoping that by the time Lunar New Year comes around, he’ll be back here, playing games with his family, listening to folk music and eating galbi-jjim and kimbap.

Before he goes, Yoo tells me a story from his past, before he’d booked his first job.

“I would imagine myself at the age of 70, in the worst-case scenario, being a poor actor, having to work part-time jobs at the convenience store,” he says, reminiscing. “And then, you know, as long as I’m not hungry, in my free time I would go out after midnight and perform for couples, never accepting money from them. Just giving them a little gift for watching.

“I have kind of this nihilistic look on life that kind of helps me to stay courageous,” he adds. “You know, you might as well die trying something and be happy, rather than conform to a certain system, or the expectations of people around you that made you unhappy anyway.”

The reality is quite different from the late-night park performances he envisioned. He feels that now. Last year, the European premiere of Past Lives took place at the Berlinale Film Festival in Germany. Four hours separate it from Cologne and so Yoo’s family joined him. More than 20 years had passed since he made that call to his father from New York, telling him he was following a path that, back then, felt unknown, maybe frightening. And as he walked the red carpet, bathed in the glow of the paparazzi flashbulbs, in the adoration of this newfound audience, his father watched on from the sidelines, crying.