“Action!”
The lights flickered.
Beneath the fluorescent lights, two people sat facing each other across a metal table.
Yoo Yeon-jae moved first.
Yoo Yeon-jae set a file down on the table with a smack.
“Kang Yoon-ho.”
A cold summons.
“How is someone who was declared dead five years ago sitting here?”
Yoo Yeon-jae's gaze settled on the crown of Park Song-min's head.
The man sat with his head bowed, utterly motionless.
A vein stood out faintly on his handcuffed wrist.
Silence stretched between them.
One second.
Two seconds.
In a corner of the set, the script supervisor glanced down at the script.
The look on the script supervisor's face suggested a question: Was he late with his line?
And then, as the third second arrived, Park Song-min slowly raised his head.
“……I waited.”
That line held the convenience store's triangular rice balls, the ceiling of his cramped boarding room, and his mother's wake. All of it.
Only the man who spoke knew that, but the listener felt a chill somewhere inside without knowing why.
‘……What's with that look in his eyes?’
The PD leaned toward the monitor.
This was where the terrible acting should have begun.
Everyone in the industry knew Park Song-hu was a bad actor, so the plan had been to cover it in the edit even if his two lines sounded awkward.
That had been the original plan.
‘But touch-ups, editing, whatever……’
Now Park Song-hu was swallowing the screen whole with a single line.
“What have you been doing for five years? Tell me from the beginning.”
The tone of a detective pressing a suspect.
A corner of Park Song-min's mouth stirred.
“From the beginning, all of it.”
The words ‘from the beginning’ carried the weight of five years' worth of evidence, while ‘all of it’ held his resolve to stop hiding.
“I waited.”
“…….”
Feeling what lay behind the line, Yoo Yeon-jae was momentarily thrown off.
‘……Better than I expected.’
Good.
Better than expected.
Yoo Yeon-jae's expectations had been at rock bottom because of Park Song-hu's reputation as the very definition of bad acting, and Park Song-hu had shot straight past them.
The timing of Park Song-hu's raised head was especially exquisite.
The script had only said, ‘Slowly raises his head,’ but Park Song-hu had given it breath.
Three seconds of silence.
During those three seconds, the tension in the interrogation room doubled, then burst all at once when Park Song-hu raised his head.
‘……What a shame.’
The scene ended there.
Yoo Yeon-jae the actor sincerely felt that way.
What would Kang Yoon-ho have said next?
Yoo Yeon-jae wanted to play off Park Song-hu a little longer.
Even though the scene was over.
“Cut! Okay!”
The PD sprang from the chair.
Applause broke out across the set.
CLAP CLAP CLAP CLAP―
“Okay? So that was one take?”
“In one go? Seriously?”
“Wow…… What was that, Song-hu?”
“……He held his own against Yeon-jae, too.”
Finishing in one take was exceedingly rare on a shoot.
It only happened when everyone was firmly convinced they couldn't get anything better.
“…….”
Park Song-min was struggling to rise from the interrogation room chair.
His legs had no strength.
He had been inside Kang Yoon-ho for the entire shoot, and now that he had come out of the role, his whole body felt limp.
As soon as he stepped off the set, Jo Yong-gi ran up to him.
“Song-hu! Song-hu, that was incredible!”
His voice trembled with emotion.
“I was watching the monitor from the side, and I got goosebumps! Did you see the crew's faces? They were all standing there with their mouths open!”
“…….”
“I really thought, wow, you must've studied acting like crazy while you were lying low. I almost cried.”
The PD was next to offer a hand.
“Song-hu, that was really good.”
Two or three crew members followed the PD.
“That was incredible.”
“The look in your eyes was insane. Seriously.”
“It's been such a long time since I felt like that on set.”
‘……What's going on? They're saying my acting was good?’
The crew's praise showed no sign of stopping.
His heart had pounded when he got ten comments on his web novel. Now praise was pouring out right in front of him!
“I-I'll head to the dressing room now…….”
For some reason, he felt bashful.
Someone stepped in front of Park Song-min as he tried to flee.
“Actor Park Song-hu.”
A middle-aged woman wearing glasses.
The murmuring set suddenly fell quiet.
“Writer Seo……?”
Seo Ha-yeong, the writer of <Hwain>.
The fact that she was here today was strange in itself, unlike her usual practice.
One crew member poked another in the arm.
“Why is Writer Seo here?”
“Nobody said she was coming today.”
Seo Ha-yeong spoke.
“After watching that performance, I would like to add a few lines.”
***
Seo Ha-yeong had first heard about casting Park Song-hu two weeks earlier.
-Writer Seo, we're thinking of using Park Song-hu for the interrogation room scene in the final episode.
“Park Song-hu?”
-Yes. His face has quite an impact……
“I grant you his looks. But what about his acting?”
-……Well, that's……
“You thought it would be fine because he only has two lines?”
-……More or less.
“That man can ruin two lines.”
Seo Ha-yeong was blunt.
“It is the final episode of <Hwain>. You are suggesting we put an actor notorious for bad acting in the scene that closes the highest-rated drama on television? And someone who has been embroiled in controversy, at that?”
The PD added cautiously.
-But the mood around him has changed lately. Have you seen <Our Hospital>?
She hadn't.
She didn't watch variety shows.
-He's not the Park Song-hu he used to be. He's getting more attention, and now everyone's talking about how he even cried in an interview.
“……Cried?”
-Yes. But you know what his acting's like. People are saying he couldn't possibly cry that naturally on command, so the tears must've been real.
She let out a disbelieving laugh.
What an irony, that bad acting could serve as proof of sincerity.
-Writer Seo, honestly, a striking face in the last episode of <Hwain> would completely change the aftertaste. With Park Song-hu's looks, the screen would come alive even if he just sat in the interrogation room. Yeon-jae agrees, too.
Yoo Yeon-jae was particular about scene partners.
If even Yoo Yeon-jae was fine with it, the visual chemistry must have been convincing.
“Ha.”
She searched for photos of Park Song-hu.
Recent photos.
His return after lying low.
As for his face, well.
She had to admit it.
If that face were sitting under the fluorescent lights in the interrogation room, it was the kind of sight that would make viewers put down their remotes.
“If his acting is too awful, we will cut him in the edit.”
-Yes, of course.
“He only has two lines, so in the worst case we can use his face and dub over his voice afterward.”
-Y-you'd go that far?
“You never know.”
She had reluctantly agreed, and two weeks passed.
As the shoot approached, Seo Ha-yeong found herself seized by a strange urge.
‘……Should I go take a look?’
She didn't normally visit sets.
Once she handed over a script, her job was done.
Directing belonged to the PD, and acting to the actors.
Seo Ha-yeong's principle was that a writer turning up on set only made everyone uncomfortable.
And yet here she was, considering it.
To be honest, she wanted to see Park Song-hu in person.
Seo Ha-yeong was only human.
It would be a shame to die without seeing in person the man hailed as a genius for his looks, whom she had only ever seen on a screen.
She was particularly curious, as a writer, about what he would look like inhabiting a character she had written.
‘Right. This is a visual check.’
On the morning of the shoot, Seo Ha-yeong arrived at the set and took a place in a corner behind the monitors.
She hadn't told anyone.
It was a spot out of the crew's sight.
Her aim was to watch quietly and leave quietly.
She saw Park Song-hu, makeup finished, sit in the interrogation room chair.
Seo Ha-yeong was stunned.
‘……He's unreal in person. And why is his face so small?’
On top of that, the weariness created by the makeup gave his features more depth.
The angle at which the fluorescent light struck his cheekbones, the shadows under his eyes.
‘Well, that face had always earned its keep.’
The problem was what came next.
‘So far, he passes. But once the acting starts……’
“Action!”
Yoo Yeon-jae delivered the first line.
The delivery was sharp and precise.
Yoo Yeon-jae, as ever.
Then the man opposite Yoo Yeon-jae raised his head.
“……I waited.”
‘……What?’
She had expected bad acting.
Lines read awkwardly, a flat delivery devoid of emotion, a performance that seemed disconnected from everyone else's.
That was what she expected from Park Song-hu.
But what was this performance?
His voice almost whispered, yet it resonated all the way to the corner of the set.
And there was the weight of emotion layered over it.
“From the beginning, all of it.”
The set fell silent, and Seo Ha-yeong's mouth dropped open.
‘……Has his acting improved this much? It'd be a waste to give him only two lines with a performance like that.’
Seo Ha-yeong knew her own writerly affliction well.
The condition that made her want to write more lines whenever she met a good actor.
The condition that left her unable to bear not knowing how the words she had written would sound in that actor's voice.
“Cut……! Cut! Okay!!”
Applause erupted.
She watched the crew surround Park Song-hu and shower him with praise.
Seo Ha-yeong walked out.
She passed through the crew and stopped directly in front of Park Song-hu.
“After watching that performance, I would like to add a few lines.”
“……?”
“I mean exactly that. Your performance just gave me a flash of inspiration.”
Yoo Yeon-jae stopped halfway through lifting a bottle of water and turned to look.
It was unprecedented for Writer Seo Ha-yeong to appear on a set.
Announcing that she would add dialogue right there was even more unprecedented.
After all, Seo Ha-yeong was famous for her rule against interfering on set.
And now she was breaking that rule for the first time.
The PD asked, bewildered.
“Writer Seo, you mean…… right here on set?”
“Yes.”
“How much are you going to add?”
“I do not know yet. I will have to write it and see.”
The PD and the assistant director exchanged glances.
In the middle of it all, Park Song-min's face had gone pale.
Writer Seo Ha-yeong turned to him and asked,
“Would you be all right with that?”
“…….”
Park Song-min's thoughts split in two.
He wanted to refuse, but he also wondered whether refusing here would hurt Park Song-hu's image.
In the end, the second thought won.
Because he was afraid of Park Song-hu……
“……I'll give it a try.”
“Good.”
Seo Ha-yeong dragged a folding table to one side of the set and sat down.
A Bluetooth keyboard lay in front of her tablet.
‘Hmm……’
This was Seo Ha-yeong's first time adding dialogue on set, too.
Usually, she sat in her study at home with a cup of coffee, agonizing all night as she polished each line.
But now she was in the middle of a set, crew members were coming and going around her, and an actor was waiting.
‘Kang Yoon-ho.’
A character she had created.
A scene in which a man believed dead sat in an interrogation room.
Originally, the scene had been intended solely for the impact of the twist.
‘What else should I have him say?’
Characters appeared one by one on the tablet.
She wrote and erased, erased and wrote.
The crew had begun to whisper among themselves.
“Has she ever added lines on set before?”
“No. Never.”
“Wow…… So Park Song-hu's acting inspired her?”
“Honestly, that performance really was good.”
Seo Ha-yeong called the PD over.
“Could you take a look at this?”
The PD came over and peered at the tablet screen.
An additional exchange between the detective and Kang Yoon-ho.
Admiration showed on the PD's face as they read.
“Wow, this is really good.”
Seo Ha-yeong nodded and pointed to one spot.
“But this part…… the key is what tone to use for it.”
This time she called the two actors over.
Yoo Yeon-jae and Park Song-min.
“Could you two come over here for a moment?”
For this part, she had decided to draw on the instincts of the people closest to the characters.
“If you look here, the detective pushes him once more. Kang Yoon-ho said, ‘From the beginning, all of it,’ and now he really starts talking from the beginning. But his beginning is not where the detective expects it to be.”
Yoo Yeon-jae's eyes moved back and forth.
Yoo Yeon-jae quickly grasped the structure of the dialogue.
“The tone of Kang Yoon-ho's last line is the key, then.”
“Yes. It's a question of what emotion to put into it.”
The PD cut in from the side.
“I think viewers would respond better to anger.”
Seo Ha-yeong disagreed.
“Anger would be too predictable. This character has spent five years in hiding. Now he has been arrested and is sitting in front of a detective. If he explodes in anger there…… it makes him too shallow.”
Yoo Yeon-jae offered a suggestion.
“What about playing it calmly, then?”
“Calm would be flat.”
They were at an impasse.
Something that wasn't anger, resignation, or calm.
All three struggled to pin down what that something was.
Park Song-min watched from a step behind them, but one line caught his eye.
Kang Yoon-ho's final line.
‘!’
The moment he read it, something flashed through his mind.
It was the feeling he got when writing a web novel.
The character's past and present connected in a single line, and he felt as though he knew what emotion the character needed to express at this moment.
‘Anger? Resignation?’
No. Neither was what a man who had spent five years in hiding felt when he sat before a detective again.
‘Relief.’
He had hidden for revenge, and returned for revenge.
But the moment he sat in front of the detective, he could finally see the end.
The release of knowing he no longer had to hide.
“Um…….”
Seo Ha-yeong, Yoo Yeon-jae, and the PD turned toward him at the same time.
Only then did Park Song-min realize he had spoken aloud, but it was too late.
He had already called out to them.
“Yes, Song-hu?”
“…….”
In the end, his instincts as the writer Mini Song made him continue.
“……May I make a suggestion?”