Gotcha
PD Myeong kept a close eye on Yoo Seul-ho for the rest of the shoot, but he couldn't find a single thing to fault him for.
Why on earth have all the PDs been trashing him all this time?
He'd heard all sorts of things from colleagues who'd actually worked with the man.
How do I put it. He doesn't push himself forward, but he's not exactly warm and fuzzy either.
There's a reason people call him the Prince. Arrogant as hell wherever he goes.
I couldn't laugh that brazenly with acting skills like his. That's why he's in showbiz and I'm not, I guess?
Different words, but they all boiled down to the same thing.
A celebrity with a textbook case of celebrity disease.
And yet the Yoo Seul-ho PD Myeong saw with his own eyes today was nothing like the rumors.
Woo Jun-seo, his co-star, was already a two-faced type with a shady reputation around the industry, so he spouted one disingenuous platitude after another. Choi Ran, famously pressured by her agency to protect her pure, innocent image, visibly did her best to keep her mouth shut.
And right beside those two, the only one giving genuinely honest answers was Yoo Seul-ho.
For a man whose reputation said he raked in every perk of stardom without shame, there was remarkably little about him that felt like a celebrity.
In other words, he had that distinctly harmless air that only comes off a person who doesn't actually think of himself as one.
And the man's good on camera, too.
Every single answer was quick-witted, and the whole talk show sparkled because of it. The booking had come together at the last minute, so expectations had been low and the worries plenty — but today's shoot with Yoo Seul-ho exceeded anything he'd hoped for.
On top of that, the hidden camera, which had only been a side segment, had turned out to be main-event material. From PD Myeong's standpoint, it was impossible not to adore the man.
Just as the production staff's eyes were filling with hearts, the time came to wrap up the shoot.
Which meant it was time to bring the hidden camera to an end.
This is exhausting.
I clenched my teeth, afraid a long sigh would slip out the moment I opened my mouth. I hadn't realized there'd be so much to keep track of just to pull off one hidden camera prank.
Guess I'm not cut out for this after all.
Deceiving people? I'd done plenty of that back in my loan shark days, so that part didn't worry me a bit. Back then, my daily routine had consisted of looking clients dead in the eye and lying — even if the whole world betrays you, I'm on your side.
I'd done that for decades. Pretending to get close to someone for a few lousy hours couldn't possibly be harder. That's what I'd thought, right up until the moment I got blindsided.
How is this harder than shooting a drama?
At least during a drama shoot, everyone around me knew I was about to act. I had no need to hide the fact that okay, I'm acting now, so I could throw myself into it completely. Right now, though, I had to act while making sure nobody caught me acting — which made it doubly tricky by definition.
Still, it went pretty well, didn't it?
Nearly two hours had passed since the hidden camera began, and Woo Jun-seo and Choi Ran appeared to have swallowed it whole. Choi Ran had been sulking silently for a while now, and Woo Jun-seo sidled over, away from the cameras, and asked,
"What's going on with you two? Something between you and Lee Seul-gi?"
"What are you talking about?"
"Oh, don't give me that. You two didn't even know each other before today, right?"
"Correct, first time meeting. You saw that yourself."
"You're hilarious. Hey, shouldn't you have given your boy a heads-up at least? What if I'd tried to move in on Seul-gi myself, huh? Our whole friendship almost went up in flames just now."
Woo Jun-seo needled me in a tone that was half joking, half sneering.
There's no way he forgot he's wearing a mic.
He'd apparently figured the staff would edit around it, because he'd completely abandoned his on-air manner, and I felt a sigh coming on all over again.
So he can say that kind of stuff even believing I'm dating Lee Seul-gi. Nice.
Not that it mattered — thanks to Woo Jun-seo's attitude, none of this conversation was making it to broadcast anyway. I gave him a lazy, half-assed reply — think whatever you want — and that seemed to confirm his suspicions, because he smirked.
"Hey, hook a brother up. You get me?"
He thumped me on the shoulder as he said it, and my patience finally hit its limit. I'd kept this going long enough — time to bring down the curtain. I glanced over at Lee Seul-gi, and she nodded right back, as if she'd been waiting for the signal.
All right. Time for the final blow.
"That's a wrap on the shoot, so— hm? Where'd Seul-gi go?"
"Right? She just vanished into thin air."
The moment the person who was supposed to close out the show went missing, a low murmur rippled through the set. Staff exchanged whispers and the cast craned their heads every which way, searching for her.
"I'll give her a call."
I pulled out my phone wearing the expression of a man who desperately wanted to go home. I tapped through a few screens and was just raising the phone to my ear when—
Whoosh!
Someone snatched it clean out of my hand. I turned my head to find Choi Ran wearing the single strangest expression I'd ever seen on her.
"What's wrong?"
"……Oppa. How do you have Seul-gi's number?"
She looked like a woman strolling down a tree-lined street who'd just run face-first into an alien. At her words, Woo Jun-seo shook his head with an oh, boy look on his face. Every camera in the room swung toward me, and the staff went dead silent.
"Don't tell me you two are actually…"
Choi Ran was acting like she'd forgotten we were in the middle of a shoot. No matter how freely this girl ran her mouth on any given day, she wasn't the type to deliberately corner someone in front of a camera.
Honestly, I wondered if I deserved that level of shock, but I supposed learning your best friend had a secret boyfriend could sting a little. A betrayal of trust, even.
"Ran-ah, the truth is…"
I spoke calmly as I turned the phone around, and held the screen up for her to see.
"…!"
The instant Choi Ran's eyes went wide, Lee Seul-gi burst out from among the staff where she'd been hiding.
"It was a hidden camera~!!"
"YAAAGH!"
Her voice projection was so thunderous that Woo Jun-seo flinched hard, then stood there looking sheepish. A beat later, her words seemed to register, and he tilted his head.
"Huh? A hidden camera?"
There was something oddly innocent about his total bafflement. At the same time, a camera crept in close and began zooming in on my phone screen. Where Lee Seul-gi's number should have been, there was only a memo:
— Gotcha —
"……"
The camera cut back and forth between the phone screen and Choi Ran's blank-faced stare. Amid it all, Woo Jun-seo was wandering around asking everyone with a dopey look, "What part of that was a hidden camera? What? Which part was the lie?"
By any measure, that was a roaring success.
I felt a little guilty for making two of the drama's leads look like fools, but I'd bought the production an extra three whole minutes of promotional airtime — surely they'd forgive me. Even after the prank was revealed, Choi Ran and Woo Jun-seo stayed dazed for a good long while.
Lee Seul-gi, whether to lift the mood or just because she couldn't help it, cackled and gave me a high-five.
"That was amazing~! An actor really is an actor, hoo!"
Even under the blast of her huge laugh, Choi Ran and Woo Jun-seo still looked like deer in headlights. Fine, whatever, those two I could understand. But then why…
Why are the staff making that face too?
It puzzled me why people who absolutely had to have known about the hidden camera were now muttering to each other, so the acting really was acting, huh… — but I figured there'd just been some breakdown in internal communication and let it go.
And with that, my first variety show shoot came to an end.
"How could you do this to me."
Once every bit of filming was done, a casual after-work drinks gathering got underway among the cast. It was originally supposed to be just Choi Ran and Lee Seul-gi, but when Woo Jun-seo found out Lee Seul-gi had invited me, he invited himself along without a shred of self-awareness.
"Huh? How could you…"
Both women had already looked displeased about Woo Jun-seo's presence to begin with, but watching him repeat the same line over and over had pushed their expressions all the way into open disgust.
"Woo Jun-seo, are you already drunk? Pace yourself."
"You deceived a whole human being and that's what you have to say to me?"
"Well, we did get extra promo time for the drama."
"Okay, fine, I'm grateful for that! But how does a person lie to another person's face so seamlessly?!"
On and on he went — you scared me, how am I ever supposed to believe a word you say again — serving up his one-hundred-and-sixty-second episode of entitled whining. And with every fresh outburst, the two women's glares dropped another few degrees.
"H-have you considered just drinking alone at home?"
Choi Ran, with no cameras around and nothing left to be careful about, made no attempt whatsoever to hide her irritation. Ignoring her completely, Woo Jun-seo skipped any attempt at pacing himself and drained glass after glass.
"It's my first variety show in ages, and you made me look like an idiot. How are you going to take responsibility for that, huh?"
Gone past the point of no return, Woo Jun-seo now started trying to hang on Lee Seul-gi. Fearing Choi Ran was about to crack a soju bottle over his skull, I hurriedly hauled him to his feet. After forcibly shoving the protesting man into a taxi and sending him off, I came back to the table to find Lee Seul-gi exhaling like she'd just survived something.
"I got chewed out for losing my taste for alcohol. Shall we actually enjoy ourselves now?"
"Sounds good. Thanks for all your hard work today, Seul-gi."
She waved me off. "Oh please. And drop the formalities already, oppa."
"Okay, sure."
"By the way, what did you and the PD talk about after the shoot? You two went on for quite a while."
"Just that we should shoot together again sometime, and since something might come up, he asked for my contact info."
"Whoa, seriously??"
Lee Seul-gi's already enormous eyes somehow grew even wider. Even I was surprised when she said she'd never once seen PD Myeong say that to any of his past guests.
"Really? I figured it was just polite lip service."
"No way. PD Myeong is famous for never giving celebrities an inch, you know. Honestly, even I found him a little scary early on in the show. He's got a prickly side… Ah — not that I know he's a good person now, of course!"
She quickly added that last part so I wouldn't get the wrong idea.
"No misunderstanding here. Anyway, I'm just glad the shoot went better than I worried it would."
"That's all you, oppa. Wow, but seriously — so that really was acting earlier?"
"Sorry?"
"No, it's just — during the hidden camera, you were looking at me so tenderly that even though I knew it was acting, it made my heart do a weird little flip, you know? You're still sweet now, but it's so different from before that it's honestly fascinating."
Lee Seul-gi thrust her thumb up, declaring that an actor's craft really was on another level — which felt like a generous overstatement coming from me, a former loan shark who'd landed in Yoo Seul-ho's body and was doing little more than a cheap imitation of the trade.
"It's really not that much. Anyway — thanks. Should we order more food?"
"Oh come on, it's exactly that much! Right, Ran-ah? What do you think?"
Even though I'd awkwardly changed the subject, Lee Seul-gi insisted on dragging Choi Ran into the agreement. Choi Ran, who had been silently inhaling her spicy chicken feet this whole time, looked up.