How a Loan Shark Survives as an Actor — Episode 27
"No! Cucumbers go in here!"
The moment Yoo Seul-ho raised his voice, every eye on set—including PD Myeong's—swiveled toward him. And what they found was a Yoo Seul-ho in complete, utter disarray.
Even in the middle of his panic, everyone watched him scramble to move his mouth, desperately trying to smooth the situation over somehow. The whole thing flashed by in less than three seconds, yet the expressions that crossed his face were not so easily forgotten.
'Well, well….'
That was when one of PD Myeong's eyebrows climbed up of its own accord. His body had moved automatically at a scene he never could have anticipated.
'You're going to run with THAT?'
Frankly, PD Myeong himself had been thinking it was a bit much, and he was the one who'd planned it. Of course, the goal had been comedy, not a proper con, so he'd never intended to sell it convincingly in the first place. That was exactly why he'd proposed such a half-assed hidden camera—a sloppy premise with no script and no proper dialogue to speak of.
The only information the production team had given Yoo Seul-ho was that Lee Seul-gi had recently developed a cucumber allergy. The instructions were truly simple: the moment she ordered cucumber kimbap, urgently talk her out of it so that the two of them wouldn't grow suspicious.
'And he turns it into THIS.'
PD Myeong had fully expected everyone to be thrown off by Yoo Seul-ho's abrupt, over-the-top intervention. He'd pictured the whole cast turning to him and asking, What are you… doing? Is this theater?
But Yoo Seul-ho had rescued that garbage line with breathtaking skill.
'It genuinely looked like a man who couldn't help himself.'
Seconds ago, Yoo Seul-ho had looked exactly like someone who'd panicked at the sight of his secret lover about to eat a food that could harm her. So startled that, for one instant, he'd forgotten everything else and simply blurted it out. That expression, brimming with sincerity, planted question marks all over the faces of Woo Jun-seo and Choi Ran, who knew nothing.
"Shall we move on to the next segment, then?"
"Let's do that."
Yoo Seul-ho and Lee Seul-gi hastily wrapped up the situation without ever properly resolving the confusion. As PD Myeong quietly trailed after the two of them, he thought:
'He's better than I expected.'
In his fifteen-plus years in this industry, PD Myeong had seen more content than he could count. Some of those had been projects Yoo Seul-ho appeared in, and not one of them had left him with a good impression. They were so bad that he'd assumed watching the man act up close would be outright painful.
But what he'd just witnessed….
'Was it the directors he had all along?'
What he'd just seen was good enough to make his head tilt—no, more than good. It was excellent.
It was so natural you forgot anyone was acting at all. Yoo Seul-ho hadn't acted weird or thrown in exaggerated gestures to telegraph the comedic awkwardness of the skit. And precisely because he hadn't, he'd managed to make an utterly unnatural situation read as natural.
'What will he do from here, though?'
There was a chance the last bit hadn't been pure luck, but the odds were high that everything ahead would be a trainwreck. It couldn't really be helped—there were no remaining lines or instructions at all.
A few hours earlier, PD Myeong had ignored his nagging conscience and told Yoo Seul-ho to just wing it with his own ad-libs.
'Even I think that was too harsh.'
It was roughly the cruelty of releasing a newborn animal into a field and immediately setting it to hunt. Of course, to say it once more—it was a line he could deliver precisely because he'd meant to make people laugh, not to actually deceive anyone.
'It's bound to be a total mess….'
And yet, strangely, he was starting to look forward to it.
PD Myeong caught himself pretending not to notice the way his heart had begun to thump, even as his gaze kept drifting back to Yoo Seul-ho again and again.
'Let's not get our hopes up.'
Woo Jun-seo and Choi Ran were no rookies; they were seasoned entertainers with real broadcast experience. If Yoo Seul-ho started behaving dramatically the way he had during the cucumber kimbap incident, there was a high chance they'd catch on—hmm, something about this feels off.
But contrary to PD Myeong's expectations….
"Ran-ah, what do you feel like eating?"
"Let's head over first, Jun-seo."
Yoo Seul-ho kept a firm distance from Lee Seul-gi, like a man who'd completely forgotten he was supposed to be secretly dating her. He spoke only to Choi Ran and Woo Jun-seo, and whenever Lee Seul-gi talked, he simply stared blankly at the camera in front of him.
He seemed to think he was being naturally aloof, but coming from a guy who'd been fawning over Lee Seul-gi all day, the sudden coldness couldn't help but look strange. And that subtle dissonance was exactly what made people's heads spin.
"Alright, shall we move to the next room?"
"Sounds great!"
As the cast and crew trooped after Lee Seul-gi's lead, Yoo Seul-ho wore a slightly weary expression. He let out a sigh steeped in fatigue, then turned his head. That was when he spotted a stray strand of hair stuck to Lee Seul-gi's cheek, and without thinking, he raised his hand.
"…!"
The instant Yoo Seul-ho's fingers touched Lee Seul-gi's cheek, their eyes met, and both pairs went wide. Yoo Seul-ho snatched his hand back like a man coming to his senses too late, and Lee Seul-gi bit her lip hard before hastily darting her gaze elsewhere.
Neither of them made a fuss. They kept the noise to an absolute minimum, like people desperately wishing the moment had never happened at all. They looked genuinely afraid to glance around and check whether anyone had seen—even though that was exactly what they wanted to do.
"……"
"……"
And naturally, Choi Ran and Woo Jun-seo witnessed the whole thing.
The camera captured Woo Jun-seo, brow furrowed, silently mouthing at Choi Ran: Did you just see that? Choi Ran, wearing an unreadable expression, gave no reply, but her eyes remained locked on Yoo Seul-ho and Lee Seul-gi.
As far as the prank went, this was as good as a success. The exact scene they'd set out to capture when they started the hidden camera had appeared on film. They could call it quits right now and no one would complain….
'What is this.'
PD Myeong watched the situation unfold in a daze, his mind a tangle. The other staff members were every bit as bewildered.
'Wasn't this… supposed to be a hidden camera?'
Woo Jun-seo and Choi Ran, who knew nothing, could be excused. But the production team—the ones who knew about the prank, the ones who had ordered it in the first place—had absolutely no reason to be confused by any of this. They should have been thanking Yoo Seul-ho for delivering such a spectacular setup. Instead, the staff kept exchanging glances with one another.
'What is up with those two??'
'Is there actually something going on between them…?'
Only when he belatedly noticed his staff's faces did PD Myeong snap back to his senses.
'There is NOTHING going on!!!!'
He wanted to scream at all of them for losing their minds, and yet on some level he understood. They knew exactly how stupid they'd look if they couldn't tell whether the prank they themselves had staged was actually a prank. But still—just look at Yoo Seul-ho's face!
'That was acting, right? Which means it's fake right now, right?'
It was realism of a kind that forced those idiotic questions out of you.
'Wait….'
By this point, the thought arrived all on its own.
'Since when can Yoo Seul-ho ACT?!'
If it were any other actor, fine. But this was Yoo Seul-ho. The Yoo Seul-ho who'd been branded Useless for years. That Yoo Seul-ho was pulling off performances like this?
A thought that began as oh, come on ended at no way. It'd make more sense if the two of them were actually dating.
And it made a strange kind of sense, because Yoo Seul-ho didn't behave like a man performing. He did only what a person genuinely would if he'd been forced to act like a stranger around his own lover—that was the level of his behavior. That ambiguous, hard-to-describe quality had been rendered with uncanny precision.
Lee Seul-gi, who had started out leaning into the variety-show vibe, caught the strange atmosphere like an infection and began to falter herself—and that only made everything look more real.
'Where on earth do you find someone this good at carrying an improv with no script?'
Since it made no sense that Yoo Seul-ho could act, the misunderstanding took root: maybe the two of them really were together. And of course, that wasn't the only reason the thought occurred.
'Look at his eyes.'
Those were the eyes of a man truly in love. The way Yoo Seul-ho stole a smile while watching Lee Seul-gi, the way his eyes crinkled—there was a deep sweetness radiating off him.
If even PD Myeong, a grown man, felt something in his body twisting involuntarily, imagine everyone else. The writing team, staffed entirely by women, had been chatting among themselves on their phones for a while now. The moment he saw the chat window scrolling at breakneck speed, PD Myeong squeezed his eyes shut.
'This is going to be a problem.'
For all his height and handsome face, Yoo Seul-ho was a male celebrity who'd never particularly charmed women. Granted, there were the occasional unhinged fans who insisted that the whole world could call him Useless, but that face was worth something—but even they were a tiny minority. Yoo Seul-ho was, fundamentally, a celebrity whose unlikable image ran extraordinarily deep, and that bled heavily into romantic appeal too.
True, the Yoo Seul-ho they'd actually seen on set greeted people politely and minded his manners, contrary to rumor. But that wasn't enough to erase an image of dislike that had accumulated relentlessly over several years.
PD Myeong knew all of this—it was the very reason he'd greenlit the hidden camera.
'The last thing we need is Yoo Seul-ho coming across as heart-fluttering.'
In reality, the concept had been the production team's decision, but the broadcast would show Lee Seul-gi being the one to approach Yoo Seul-ho and propose the hidden camera—the premise of secretly dating her.
A female celebrity taking that kind of initiative with a male one was never a wise move. With older talent you might let it slide, but with Yoo Seul-ho and Lee Seul-gi both barely into their mid-twenties, this kind of thing was easy ammunition for critics.
PD Myeong had pushed ahead without much worry precisely because, as mentioned, Yoo Seul-ho carried that unlikable image. It only worked because there was no one alive who'd whisper, would you look at her, tailing after our Seul-ho?
'But those romance eyes, though.'
PD Myeong would stake his sixteen-year career as a PD on it. The moment this variety show aired, there would be an earthquake. Never mind whether Yoo Seul-ho's acting was good or bad—demand for that Melo Gaze was going to spike violently, and he'd bet everything he had on it.
'We can't let our precious Seul-gi take the heat for this.'
PD Myeong decided he'd have to shoot additional footage today, hassle or not. He'd bring Lee Seul-gi and Yoo Seul-ho together and film the production team delivering the mission directly—somehow, they had to make it clear that the mastermind behind this hidden camera was the production team itself.
'What a day of surprises this has been.'
PD Myeong's gaze settled on Yoo Seul-ho. An inexplicable, peculiar feeling seized him.
Somehow… he had a strong premonition that the entertainment industry was about to be shaken to its core.