Park Seo-joon "No Regrets, Only Pride"

Actor Park Seo-joon is opening up about how he views ratings, after his latest drama wrapped to a quieter reception than some of his earlier hits. In an interview at a cafe in Seoul's Gangnam district on Nov. 15, the actor discussed his work on the JTBC weekend romance "Waiting for Gyeongdo."

The series follows Lee Gyeong-do (Park Seo-joon) and Seo Ji-woo (Won Ji-an), two former lovers who broke up twice before meeting again under awkward circumstances. He is the reporter who breaks a cheating scandal. She is the wife of the man at the center of it. From there, the show turns into a romance about two people drawn back to each other. Park plays an entertainment desk deputy editor who has carried a torch for the same woman for 18 years.

"Waiting for Gyeongdo" opened at a 2.7 percent rating and climbed to 4.7 percent for its finale, averaging around 3 percent across its run. Asked whether the numbers disappointed him, Park was direct.

"Ratings aren't something I can control," he said. "But it's hard not to think about them. They're the surface-level measure of a show."

He added that the response still mattered to him on a personal level. "As someone making the work, you want it to reach as many people as possible. The people I worked with on this were wonderful, so I wanted the show to mean something, even a little, to everyone involved."

Still, Park said he is at peace with how the project turned out. "I think I finished it well. I had a lot of doubts while we were shooting, but watching the finished version, I have no regrets at all. What's left is pride."

In South Korea, a 3 percent rating on a cable network like JTBC is not a flop, but it falls short of the breakout numbers tied to Park's earlier titles, which makes his candor about the figures notable in an industry that often deflects the question entirely.