Heo Sung-Tae And Jo Bok-Rae Team Up To Make A Bust In ‘The Informant’

Heo Sung-tae and Jo Bok-rae play a mismatched crime-fighting duo in the Korean action comedy The Informant. Their comic interactions suggest they have a long history of making jokes together. It isn’t the first time they’ve shared a set. However, the last time they met was on a drama about the Japanese occupation of Korea. It didn’t end well for Jo’s character.

“I was an independence freedom fighter and he was Japanese,” said Jo. “So he actually killed me.”

When not killing him on screen, Heo was so nice to him on set that Jo was impressed.

“I think it’s a superpower of Sung-tae’s that everyone feels very comfortable around him,” said Jo. “Sung-tae actually gave me the script to read for this film and suggested having me on board.”

That was a good call since together the actors make a funny team in ‘The Informant.’ Jo (Josée, Coin Locker Girl) plays the smart but sly informant Tae-bo and Heo plays Nam-hyeok, a police officer whose botched sting operation landed him in trouble. Jo’s character is smart enough to infiltrate several crime scenes and even to skim off the profits during a bungled bust. Lately, all Nam-hyeok’s busts are bungled and the not-so-dynamic duo must deal with double crosses and blown covers. Heo, who also appeared in the dramas Big Bet and currently appears in the drama Good Boy, also had a role in the first season of Squid Game. It proved to be a career changer.

“‘That project has been such a fortune in my career,” said Heo.” I think thanks to that experience I was able to be in The Informant as well. I’m very thankful and grateful that the project was part of my life. I think maybe one of the viewing points for viewers who have seen me in Squid Game and will possibly see me in this film is that it would be fun to compare the different characters. Viewers might find that refreshing.”

Heo also plays a detective in Good Boy, but a slightly more competent one. In The Informant, his character even gets kidnapped by the gangsters he wants to arrest. While trying to escape he runs through the woods at night, handcuffed and wearing only his underwear. Heo jokes that it was “the most important scene in the film.” It’s certainly one of the funniest, which doesn’t mean it was easy to film.

‘It was cold, really really cold,” said Heo. “Personally I was going through a difficult time when I was filming that scene. I was personally suffering. It’s late autumn, it’s cold. We were filming for like two or three days at night.”

However, suffering through those chilly nights paid off.

“As an actor you just have to do your stuff,” he said with a smile. “But then when I saw the cuts and people are laughing and you see the crew laughing. I got so much catharsis from that experience as well. It was a mix of I was hurting, but I was also being healed by the laughter. So, maybe if you see that scene, that’s why it’s more affecting. I was going through a lot at the time.”

Kim Min-ju (Firefighters), who plays Nam-hyeok’s wary police colleague and secret crush, shared that it was a really good set to work on and “super fun.”

“Being on set was such a comedic experience in and of itself,” she said. ‘There was such a spontaneous unpredictability about everything. So it was definitely a fun experience.”

There are plenty of movies that deal with the relationship between criminals and the police. While most handle the subject matter in a dramatic way, director Kim Seok wanted to make a comedy about crooks and cops.

“I wanted to sort of twist that subject matter and spin it more into a comedy,” said Kim Seok “That’s how I started the film. We thought of the subject matter in 2018, so that was about seven years ago. In the initial workings of it, we wanted it to be more of a black comedy, so not as a straightforward comedy, but in the process of developing it, we were like, let’s go more fully comedic tone on this one. That’s how it came about.”

One of the most enjoyable things about the film is the pacing. The plot of this buddy romp proceeds smoothly and speedily with a constant supply of laugh-inducing scenes that seem to tumble into the next. The enjoyable pacing may have something do with the director’s past work as an editor.

“Before I started directing, I started on set as an editor,” said Kim Seok. “I think that experience definitely helped in the pacing of the film. Our producer was saying that in order to match that audience demand for entertainment, you have to be very aware of moving the film along and having it have a speediness to it. You can really take the audience onto a journey.”

Busts-gone-wrong, random assaults and a kidnapping deliver plenty of action scenes and also lots of opportunities for physical comedy, but throughout these entertaining sequences, there’s also a strong disturbing sense that you can’t really trust any of the players. The police betray each other, the gangsters betray each other and Nam-hyeok can’t even trust his own informant.

“We were really focused on having an entertaining film that audiences could watch,” said Kim Seok. “But the seed of this film really does come from my perspective on the characters and just human beings as a whole. It is definitely based on my own personal experiences with people where there are places where you just can’t trust people around you. But I was thinking I can’t just directly use that in a film. I was trying to figure out how do I alchemize this, making it into more of a comedy.”

The result is a buddy film with Korean flair and lots of laughs. Heo and Jo make an endearing duo that ultimately delivers. The Informant debuted at the 2025 New York Asian Film Festival.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.