Ha Jung-woo adds touch of romance to ‘Assassination’
SEOUL: Actor Ha Jung-woo’s transformations for he cinema have been startling.
For Kundo: Age of the Rampant, he shaved his head and played the part of a lowly 19th- century butcher who avenges his family. In The Terror Live, he was an anchorman rigged with an armed bomb. The Berlin File transformed him into a deadly North Korean agent.
When director Choi Dong-hoon ( The Thieves) tapped him for the fi lm Assassination, he asked him to play a character that required hardly any acting.
“When I read the script, I could see that (Choi) had observed me carefully,” Ha said at a round-table interview at a cafe in Palpan- dong, Seoul. “The character felt like me, in the stage directions written on the script, in the way that he played around with words when he spoke.”
In the action-packed, starstudded Assassination, Ha plays Hawaii Pistol, a hit man who would kill anyone of any nationality for the right price. He takes a job to eliminate three Joseon ( Korean) independence fi ghters who are planning an assassination attempt of their own on high-level Japanese figures.
For Assassination, set in the dark era of the Japanese colonial rule, to be a commercial success, it had to fi nd balance: the middle point between a heavyhanded story of patriotism and an irreverent lightweight. Ha’s character Hawaii Pistol was instrumental to fi nding that middle ground.
“That’s exactly what (Choi) asked of me,” said Ha. “Insincere, but weighty. Weighty, yet light. He wanted me to move back and forth across that line.”