Park Chan-wook will adapt The Sym­pa­thiz­er for TV, with Robert Downey Jr. on board

Big things are a‑brewing for Park Chan-wook, who hasn’t released a new fea­ture since The Hand­maid­en in 2016. That should change soon with Deci­sion to Leave, an espi­onage thriller set in his native Korea that’s been in the can for some time now, but he’s already lin­ing up anoth­er major under­tak­ing that will most like­ly have more main­stream appeal for audi­ences in the west.

Dead­line has the exclu­sive that Park will return to TV fol­low­ing his John le Car­ré adap­ta­tion The Lit­tle Drum­mer Girl, with a small-screen take on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s nov­el The Sym­pa­thiz­er. And depend­ing on your view of the film indus­try, the buried lede here is that Robert Downey Jr. will take a star­ring role in his first major post-MCU gig.

Thanh’s Pulitzer-win­ning genre hybrid charts the wind­ing path of a French-Viet­namese com­mu­nist spy in the years after Amer­i­ca with­drew its mil­i­tary pres­ence, as the unnamed char­ac­ter makes his way from Saigon, to Los Ange­les, to the Philip­pines, going from refugee to improb­a­bly film con­sul­tant to pris­on­er. A world­wide search is cur­rent­ly on for an unknown actor to por­tray the lead role, though his antag­o­nist has already been settled.

Downey Jr. will play mul­ti­ple roles, all of them unit­ed by their foun­da­tions in an insti­tu­tion­al Amer­i­can white­ness oppos­ing the lead­ing man — a ris­ing Cal­i­forn­ian con­gress­man, a CIA oper­a­tive, and a movie direc­tor rep­re­sent­ing Hollywood’s view­point, to name only a few. It’s been a good long time since we’ve seen the for­mer great do any heavy-duty act­ing, his tal­ents con­strained with­in the iron shell of his super­hero costume.

Though this is as much of a come­back for Park as it is for his cast, the direc­tor join­ing forces with A24 and HBO, the stu­dio-net­work part­ner­ship that brought us Eupho­ria. The direc­tor has demon­strat­ed a ver­sa­til­i­ty between tones and gen­res in his var­ied body of work, so he’s an ide­al choice for a far-span­ning text that oscil­lates between polit­i­cal intrigue, black com­e­dy, and inti­mate por­trai­ture of racial iden­ti­ty dur­ing a his­tor­i­cal flashpoint.