Jin Seon-kyu knows you might not be laughing at this one

“Honestly, I’m my daughter’s servant these days,” Jin Seon-kyu says. “Whatever she asks for, she gets.”

It’s a disarming thing to hear from the actor who once put a chill into 2017’s “The Outlaws” as a Chinese-Korean mob enforcer, the breakout turn that earned him a Blue Dragon.

Sitting across from him at a cafe in central Seoul on a recent Monday afternoon and that gangster is nowhere to be found. Jin is soft-spoken to the point of self-effacement, and by his own account, a passive sort, more inclined to listen than to lead, the kind of person who’d rather see someone else make the call.

He is also a character actor who slips so cleanly into each part that no single role ever hardens into a public image. He’s done a bit of everything — most recently playing the earnest lawyer in Netflix’s “The Price of Confession” and the sleazy producer in “Aema.” A filmography like his runs hot and cold, and Jin gives the good guys and the bad ones the same straight-faced commitment.

His latest, the Netflix action-comedy “Husbands in Action,” was released on Friday, and it’s built for chaos from the jump. Jin’s narcotics cop is dragooned into a grudging alliance with the much younger man his ex-wife has since married (Gong Myung) after she’s abducted by a drug ring.

Comedy is hardly new ground for Jin, and the obvious yardstick sits close at hand. “Extreme Job,” the 2019 comedy about a narc squad running a fried-chicken joint as a stakeout front, racked up over 16 million admissions and lodged itself among the most-watched Korean films ever made. Jin stole more than a few scenes in that one, and Gong was right there with him.

Hits like that never stop trailing the people who made them, and Jin made peace with the comparison early on.

“The bar’s right there, and it’s a high one — the whole country was in on it,” he says. “Sure, people are going to hold this up against it. But I never went in thinking I had to beat it. You just try to do right by the story you’ve got.”

The man is all business on the job but something of a pushover at home, and Jin recognized a good deal of himself in the role.

“On the job, he’s this ace — he has to look the part, nab the bad guy, keep it together,” Jin says. “Underneath, there’s this goofy, tender side, especially with his kid.”

The public man and the private one can’t be the same, he figures; this time, he simply reached for the father he already is and let that carry the part.

It’s a role that anchors a film without much restraint. “Husbands in Action” is loud and broad and dead sure of its own cheap gags, silly to the point of self-parody.

The picture is riding high on Netflix’s charts — it topped the movie list in seven territories — but at home, at least, the reception has been brutal, with a 2.2 out of 5 on Watchapedia, the country’s go-to ratings app. Koreans have watched this brand of dumb-fun slapstick get run into the ground since at least the mid-2000s, and the appetite for it has more or less dried up.

Jin seems aware of all of it, and, true to type, he goes looking for the bright side. “Would I be lying if I said the mixed reviews didn’t sting? Yeah, I’d be lying,” he says. “But that’s comedy for you. It lives or dies on the crowd. Everyone’s got their own taste, and you just can’t please them all.”

The reviews might be a letdown, but the shoot, by his telling, was anything but — and it shows the moment Jin starts talking about his castmates. Jin calls his co-star Kim Ji-seok the kind of presence a set leans on. He’s still floored by Yoon Kyung-ho, whose command of the action caught him off guard and whose gift of gab he envies. His own delivery, Jin jokes, runs sleepy and flat, somewhere between a documentary narrator and a Sunday sermon.

Jin saves his kindest words for Gong, his partner in crime going back seven years. The two have stayed close since “Extreme Job,” and Jin says the reunion drove home just how far the younger actor has come.

“Back on ‘Extreme Job,’ he still had that youngest-of-the-bunch feel,” he says. “This time I saw a real lead, someone with a center of gravity. I just thought, he’s so cool — he’s grown up so well.”

He has a soft spot, too, for “Running Man” star Jeon So-min, who turns up as a reporter with a nose for a story and a thing for Jin’s cop. He came in expecting the variety star and left converted. “I owe her an apology, because she really threw me,” he says. “Not a lot of screen time, but you could feel how seriously she takes it.”

As for what comes next, Jin is changing gears entirely. He’s shooting “100 Days of Lies,” a colonial-era TV series in which he plays a Japanese official — a turn that has him grinding through dialogue in a language he barely speaks.

Action, though, is a genre he intends to keep at for the long haul. “I want to do it as long as my body holds up,” he says. “And with a face like mine, you can’t exactly not do action.”

To stay in fighting shape, he keeps it simple, running most days and keeping a close eye on his blood sugar level. An actor, after all, has only so many years in his face before the roles use it up.

“Husbands in Action” is now streaming on Netflix.

moonkihoon@heraldcorp.com