Episode 11. Can't You Just Take It Easy? (1)
Before episode 1 aired.
The Spy and I — as anyone who knew it was aware — was a drama that had undergone a catastrophic upheaval in its storyline thanks to the sudden transformation of its cast. An actor who had been nothing more than an extra had been elevated beyond all reason, lifted up and seated in the highest leading role.
Because of that, the writer, Ryu Soo-min, had been forced to tear apart a substantial portion of the script she had spent so long preparing.
"Mmmgh…"
Pushing her glasses, which had slid slightly down her nose, back up, Ryu Soo-min leaned back against her chair and let out a groan of suffering. It had been barely an hour since the lines of text on her laptop had stopped moving.
She had declared boldly to PD Min Byung-dae that she could build Muyoung's storyline, but adding a lead character — not some ordinary extra, but a genuine lead — was by no means an easy task.
"No, no, Ryu Soo-min! Don't get weak on me now! You can do this!"
Her face scrunched up in a deep frown, she patted her own cheeks lightly, pumping herself up with self-suggestion.
The Spy and I had originally been nothing more than a third-rate romantic comedy script about two people's childish, bickering love. The story of a conglomerate chairman's youngest daughter and a man who approaches her on the back of a special assignment.
The male lead is introduced as an industrial spy who extracts information from the corporation's top executives while dealing with them. His meeting the female lead, too, was part of that mission — an attempt to pull data from the conglomerate 'Shinseong'.
But as third-rate dramas invariably go, the male lead falls for the female lead and little by little begins to reform himself. The two of them overcome the crises closing in around them together, and step by step the story marches toward its ending.
That was the shape of their absurd, endearing romance. A tale of the chairman's youngest daughter and the spy who came to infiltrate her life — a love story laced with just a hint of tension. The material had seemed modest but palatable, the kind of safe fare that would go down reasonably well with the public.
But here was the problem.
"It's awkward to wedge Muyoung in."
No matter how lowbrow the show might be, could another lead really barge into an already finished story? Especially a character like Muyoung, who carried none of the right energy to slot into these two people's farcical comedy.
The core Muyoung scene she needed to write was the moment of the truck accident. Muyoung saves Lee Hye-in, crashing into a plot that had been flowing along just fine without him. What Ryu Soo-min had to create was the web of connections that would spring up between him and the leads from that point onward.
"Muyoung… Muyoung, huh…"
But at that moment, a memory flashed through Ryu Soo-min's mind.
Muyoung had, from the very start, been a colorless extra given color only by throwing himself in front of a truck to save the heroine. A handsome face and a perfectionist's temperament. A restrained charisma worn on the surface, with a hidden pain buried beneath it — the kind of combination that let women everywhere spin endless fantasies.
And yet, when she thought back on it—
"Did I ever tell Han Seol anything about Muyoung's story directly?"
No. She could say it with certainty: until his audition, she had never given Han Seol any detailed information about the character Muyoung. Then how on earth had he managed to play him?
"Surely…"
What she had passed along to Han Seol through her assistant director had been extremely limited. It might have sounded a little irresponsible, but Ryu Soo-min herself had created Muyoung on pure inspiration, and with time so short back then, she had never managed to fully design him.
There was a background she had sketched, but no detailed past. There was a personality she had shaped, but no account of how it had hardened into place.
And yet Han Seol had played Muyoung perfectly. As though he himself were Muyoung.
"Isn't this literally genius?"
By this point, the strangeness of it had registered, and Ryu Soo-min carefully covered her mouth with a grave expression.
Actors who went on to be called true greats had always had at least one special anecdote attached to them. People for whom a film set felt as comfortable as their own home. Legends of actors so absorbed in a role that their own personality briefly fused with the character's.
"I always just assumed those were marketing ploys."
But thinking back on the performance Han Seol had shown, she had to admit that the old anecdotes weren't entirely fabrications. A person capable of fusing with a character based on nothing but a name and a roughly sketched profile. Such an actor had actually appeared before Ryu Soo-min, and he was set to star in her very own work.
"…I should meet him."
Wringing her hands over it alone would produce nothing. It might wound her pride as a writer, but if someone had emerged who understood her character more deeply than she did, refusing to ask his advice would be the more foolish course.
Having gotten Han Seol's contact information through the PD, Ryu Soo-min arranged to wait for him at a café near the KSM Broadcasting Station.
"Um, I'll have an iced Americano… and will you be having something too, PD Min?"
"We're at a café, of course I'm ordering. That's what seats are for."
"……"
"Ah, for me — a matcha frappuccino, half java chips, with chocolate drizzle on top. Thanks."
"…That's remarkably specific."
"Details like these are what make a convincing PD. Oh, and I'll get the bill. You work hard enough — the least I can do is buy you a coffee."
Originally, Ryu Soo-min had planned to meet Han Seol alone and ask him for concrete advice about Muyoung. If the Spy and I team found out about the situation, she feared the anxieties surrounding the already shaky production would only deepen, so she had intended to keep it as quiet as possible.
But with PD Min Byung-dae along, hiding it was no longer an option.
"So, PD, what brings you here, exactly?"
"The writer's meeting an actor — what else would a PD come for? I came to work."
At his words, Ryu Soo-min nodded and turned over what to say next. PD Min Byung-dae was strangely hard to read. Even though the network called him a has-been, she had never once seen him complain or shrink under it. And that remark just now — if she thought about it — sounded suspiciously like a man who already knew exactly why she was meeting Han Seol.
"…You're not curious at all, are you, PD?"
"About what?"
"Why I'm meeting actor Han Seol."
"Hm? That?"
A brief silence settled. It was Ryu Soo-min, who had been quietly watching his reaction, who broke it first.
But Min Byung-dae only smiled for a moment at her words, then continued playfully.
"Well, what other reason would a young man and woman in their twenties have to meet? Interest sparks, and then you find ways to contact each other on the side, right?"
"No, no! It's not like that!"
At Ryu Soo-min's fierce, flustered reaction, Min Byung-dae let out a short laugh. It was the picture of an older man teasing a child, plain for anyone to see. And when Ryu Soo-min, catching on to his intent, went red in the face, he smiled quietly and spoke.
"Everybody starts out that way. That's just how people live."
"…This isn't about dating, is it?"
"Heh. Think whatever's comfortable for you. Everyone has a first time for everything, so don't stress over it. You're doing great already."
From the moment Ryu Soo-min had said she wanted to meet Han Seol, Min Byung-dae had understood her thinking well enough. Frankly, the request he and Jung Deok-jin had made of her bordered on the nonsensical by any reasonable standard: adding a character to a script that was already finished. Min Byung-dae had never written a drama scenario himself, but as a PD, he knew all too well how much of an imposition that demand was.
Ziiiing—
"Ah, the drinks are up. I'll get them."
At the buzz of the pickup bell, Ryu Soo-min rose from her seat and headed for the counter. But at that very moment, a man was pushing open the café door and walking in.
"Ah! Actor Han Seol. Welc… huh?"
Astonishingly, he was still wearing Muyoung's suit.
Damn it. I should have bought new clothes.
Right before heading out to make the appointment after receiving Ryu Soo-min's message, Han Seol had discovered that he owned exactly one suit and nothing else. His acting fee hadn't come in yet, and his schedule had been brutally packed besides, leaving him no room to procure clothes on short notice.
But he couldn't very well go out naked, so he had made do with a few touches to the shirt's details and set off for the café.
"So… is that the suit from the audition?"
"Yes."
"I'm pretty sure it's the same one, but it feels somehow different. Still, the attention to detail is incredible. Owning multiple copies of the same suit can't be easy."
"……"
PD Min Byung-dae had concluded that Han Seol was a gentleman who kept several identical suits on hand, and Ryu Soo-min, nodding along beside him in open admiration, thought exactly the same.
I'll just keep my mouth shut.
Han Seol decided to economize on words. A pitiable young man too poor to afford a single change of clothes was being mistaken for some detail-obsessed prodigy of a rising star — pointing out the error would only earn him pity.
"So, what brings you to me today…"
At Han Seol's question, PD Min Byung-dae looked toward Writer Ryu Soo-min — the expression of a man who figured that if anyone had something to say, she'd best say it herself. After a short silence, Ryu Soo-min opened her mouth to Han Seol with a slightly more resolute look on her face.
"What… what are your thoughts on Muyoung?"
"Sorry? Muyoung?"
"Yes. I'm actually revising the script right now, and I'd like to hear what you think, since you're the one who'll be playing him."
At her question, Han Seol tilted his head briefly, then offered his answer carefully.
"Well, Muyoung is… a lonely man."
"Mm-hmm."
"Lee Hye-in's bodyguard."
"Right."
"And a friend and rival to the protagonist, Kim Ha-jin—"
"…Wait a moment."
Ryu Soo-min hadn't gotten the answer she'd hoped for from Han Seol. Everything he'd said so far was copied straight from the profile she had sent him. What she'd wanted were the hidden intentions and temperament that only Han Seol had understood in Muyoung — which was why she had no choice but to cut him off.
"I'm really sorry, but is there nothing beyond that?"
"Sorry? That's the content you personally passed along to me, though?"
"I know… but what I felt watching your performance just wasn't that…"
As Han Seol's face clouded with confusion, Ryu Soo-min dropped her head, hiding the disappointment that welled up in an instant. But watching her, Han Seol scratched the bridge of his nose for a moment before picking the question back up.
"It's exactly that feeling, though?"
At his words, Ryu Soo-min cautiously raised her head.
"To be honest with you, I think the Muyoung you created is a flawless character."
"……Pardon?"
Muyoung had been abandoned by his parents as a child and raised through a bleak, deprived youth. Somewhere along the way, a feral edge had crept into his eyes without his noticing, and it was precisely that quality which caught the attention of the man who would take him in and teach him.
But isn't that already more than enough?
Han Seol had lived as an intelligence agent, meeting every manner of humanity. There were those soaked through with greed, lying in wait for any crack through which success might be seized — and there were, just as surely, those who had given up on everything and simply lived on because they couldn't bring themselves to die.
And Muyoung was a man who leaned closer to the latter of the two.
"Writer, did Muyoung ever have a dream?"
"A dream? Well, I'm not really…"
"No. As you know better than anyone, Muyoung had no dream."
Han Seol recalled the Muyoung of the script he had read. He was a character who had lived a life strikingly similar to Han Seol's own years as an agent. A life spent believing the only thing he possessed was his own body — and then having even that stolen from him.
"But then he found one, didn't he?"
That, one could say, was the single greatest thing Han Seol and Muyoung had in common.
"Muyoung meets Lee Hye-in and begins filling an empty life. He gains a goal — the wish to be happier — and starts wanting to see a wider world."
And at the center of all those wishes stood Lee Hye-in. Just as 'becoming an actor' stood at the center of every one of Han Seol's own wishes.
"You understood, with tremendous precision, the difference between a person with no goal and a person with a clear one. And I grasped all of that just from reading Muyoung's profile."
"…I did?"
"Would you like to see?"
At Han Seol's abrupt words, Ryu Soo-min nodded without thinking — her memory of exactly how she had written her own profile had grown a little hazy, after all. What she failed to anticipate, however, was that the subject omitted from the phrase 'would you like to see' was the acting.
Whoosh.
"Where are you going all of a sudden?"
"You said you wanted to see. I need to order a drink anyway, so just wait a moment."
Han Seol walked to the counter. He exchanged a few words with the staff member there, and after a while returned to the table carrying a single cup of coffee.
Slide.
But not at the table where the three of them had been talking.
"…Who are you?"
It was at the neighboring table — where a woman in her early twenties was already seated.