"[2] In 2005, Park drew critical notice with his much-praised portrayal of the influential son of a paper mill owner in Kim Dae-seung's period thriller Blood Rain (2005).
[4] Titled "Sweet, Bloodthirsty Lover" in Korean, Park played a timid college lecturer in his late 20s who finally finds his first girlfriend, only he begins to suspect that she may be a serial killer.
He played a kindly handyman with a crush on a piano teacher in For Horowitz (2006), a world-weary cop investigating the murders of orphaned girls in The World of Silence (2006),[8] a detective who sacrifices his ethics to pay for his wife's medical bills in Beautiful Sunday (2007),[9][10] one husband of two partner-swapping married couples in Love Now (2007), and a suave con artist out to steal treasure in Once Upon a Time (2008).
At the press conference of Kim Han-min's 2009 thriller Handphone, Park said he hoped viewers wouldn't interpret the two characters as simply good and evil, but as real people with understandable motivations within the context of their situations.
[13] Loosely based on a real-life person, the protagonist Park played is born a poor butcher's son and becomes Joseon's first surgeon and an independence fighter.
[15][16] Multicultural comedy Papa followed in 2012, in which his character is an entertainment manager who becomes an adoptive father to six children in the United States, and encourages the eldest daughter to join an audition program.
[19] He next appeared in Song Il-gon's Forest of Time (2012), which blurs the boundary between documentary and narrative filmmaking, as Park and Japanese actress Rina Takagi spend ten days searching for the reportedly 7,200-year-old Jōmon Sugi, a cryptomeria tree in the renowned forest of Yakushima, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that inspired the Hayao Miyazaki animated film Princess Mononoke.