‘Pachinko’ showrunner Soo Hugh on Season 2, and what’s next for Sunja and Hansu

Change is in the air in Pachinko Season 2.

Created by Soo Hugh, the decades-spanning adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s novel of the same name continues to tell the intertwining stories of Sunja Baek (Minha Kim and Yuh-Jung Youn) and her grandson Solomon (Jin Ha). But there are some substantial differences at play. This season heads to new locations, elevates characters like Sunja’s sons Noa (Kang Hoon Kim) and Mozasu (Eunseong Kwon) to higher prominence, and reunites Sunja with her former lover Koh Hansu (Lee Minho) after 14 years apart. There’s even a new title sequence to usher us into Pachinko‘s next chapters.

Mashable spoke with Hugh about some of the biggest changes Pachinko viewers can expect in Season 2, including trips to the countryside, Noa and Mozasu’s new roles, and what comes next for Sunja and Hansu.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mashable: One big change coming into Pachinko Season 2 is we get a new title sequence with new actors, more pachinko parlors, and a new song, “Wait a Million Years” by The Grass Roots. What was the thought process behind changing up the sequence?

Soo Hugh, showrunner, writer, and producer of Pachinko: It’s always the most fun part of the show, filming those title sequences. And we love Season 1’s version, but half those actors aren’t in the show anymore. We could have recut it, but I think it would have really hurt the flow of the title sequence. Redoing it also gave us an opportunity to bring more of our actors into the piece.

The song we chose, when you listen to its lyrics, you realize it’s a love song. They say, “I would wait a million years.” And so many of the storylines in Season 2 are about, what does it mean to find someone that really understands and sees you? That just became a bigger part of Season 2.

In Season 1, you expanded on elements of the original novel, including an episode focused on Koh Hansu’s experience in the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923. What was something from the novel you were most excited to expand upon or explore in Season 2?

We really bring up the second generation more in Season 2, so it becomes so much more Noa and Mozasu’s story. Pachinko is this generational saga, so it’s been nice to start building out their stories and adding their points of view. It makes it a challenge in some ways: There’s so many more storylines to balance in Season 2 than we had in Season 1. We had to figure out how to deftly weave in all these stories without making it feel like all of a sudden we have too many things to follow.

Eunseong Kwon and Kang Hoon Kim in “Pachinko.”
Credit: AppleTV+

With the emphasis on Noa and Mozasu, we get a coming-of-age story in this season, with schoolboy angst and struggles to make friends. I’d love to hear more about that.

We want to try and create this portrait of what it is to be these characters in this time period. Even though we’ve never seen Solomon in school when he’s a kid, when you see what happens to Noa, you understand something similar probably happened to Solomon as well. So there’s this doubling — these are shared experiences between the generations.

At the end of episode 1, we see Sunja and Hansu reunite after being separate for most of Season 1. Tell me about crafting that reunion, and what it was like to bring these two characters back together.

We knew there was so much expectation riding on that scene. Season 1 ends with Hansu first seeing Sunja, and now episode 1 of Season 2 ends with them finally confronting each other. They haven’t seen each other in 14 years. If you were in that situation, what would you say to that person? For Sunja, it’s such a shock. So it was important to give it that dramatic weight, that emotional weight, and at the same time, making sure that we’re not betraying who Sunja is. She’s not just going to run into his arms!

Lee Minho and Minha Kim in “Pachinko.”
Credit: AppleTV+

Exactly. I know there are a lot of people who want to see these characters together, and a lot of people who don’t. As Sunja and Hansu’s relationship comes to the forefront this season, what is something you hope viewers take away or learn from this aspect of the story?

Something that I think is really important and that we want to emphasize in Season 2 is that these people don’t even know each other that well. In Season 1, they were together only a few times before she got pregnant and had to decide that she couldn’t live the life that he wanted her to live as a mistress. So Season 2 is actually the season where they get to know each other as people.

What I’m interested in, more than a romance, is we actually see a friendship start to develop between these two people. That’s even bigger than a romantic angle: How do these two people understand each other? Because now they’re both parents, and their shared love for Noa really brings them together in a stronger way than just lust or romantic love.

We know from the Season 2 trailer that Hansu, Sunja, and Sunja’s family end up in the countryside, meaning so much of their chance to reconnect happens in the country as opposed to the city. How will that new setting impact their burgeoning connection?

I love that question, because they fell in love in the Korean countryside when Sunja was a teenager, right? So there’s something about the countryside that takes them back to being home, and there’s a comfort in that. Hansu always says, in some ways, he’s always looking for where home is. He lives in this big mansion with his Japanese father-in-law, and yet the place he feels most comfortable is with Sunja.

Pachinko Season 2 premieres Aug. 23 on Apple TV+, with a new episode every Friday.