White Blood – Script Reading
Director Hwang Min-gwon opened the proceedings.
"Hello, everyone. I'm Hwang Min-gwon, the director of White Blood. Let's not fear failure—let's make a work bursting with personality."
Applause rolled through the conference hall as the director laid out his ambitions.
The way he tried to project gravity sat a little awkwardly on him.
So Director Hwang can act normal sometimes.
Yeon-woo, who knew the man's usual temperament all too well, allowed himself a faint smile.
He wasn't the only one struggling to keep a straight face. Behind him, CG Director Jeong Yo-han could be seen clamping a hand over his mouth among the staff.
Next, Writer Kim Jin-ju rose to her feet.
"I'm Kim Jin-ju, the writer. I have real confidence in this project."
Waaah—
Her assured declaration drew another round of applause and cheers.
Yeon-woo's turn came next.
He had planned to offer a brief greeting and sit back down, but after the writer and director had both projected such confidence, it seemed better to keep the momentum going and lift everyone's spirits.
Hmm. What should I say to really fire them up?
After a moment's thought, Yeon-woo rose slowly from his seat.
"As for this project…"
He let the pause hang, sweeping his gaze around the room before continuing.
"I intend to shoot with the resolve to take the number-one spot on Netflix worldwide. To all my senior and junior colleagues, and to every member of this outstanding staff—I look forward to working with you."
Ooooh—
The bold declaration drew admiring murmurs mixed with soft laughter.
Actress Lee Ju-mi, cast as Jordan, clapped as she leaned over to whisper to the actor she usually sat with.
"But seriously. Doesn't it feel like he might actually do it?"
"…Yeah. Must be the aura. Feels like he really will hit number one."
Had anyone else said it, people would have scoffed at the overconfidence. Coming from the first Korean actor to win the Golden Bear, though, the claim no longer sounded entirely empty.
When Yeon-woo sat down, the youngest cast member, Han Byeol, sprang up from her seat.
"Hello! I'm Han Byeol! Family name Han, given name Byeol—single character!"
With her hair in twin tails, she bowed her head, delivered exactly what needed saying, and dropped back into her chair so quickly that smiles tugged at every mouth in the room.
After the rest of the cast finished their introductions, everyone pulled out their scripts.
"All right, shall we start matching our chemistry?"
At Director Hwang Min-gwon's words, the assistant director called out.
"We will now begin the script reading for White Blood."
「A man wrapped in clanking chains was dragged into a dome-shaped building cobbled together from packed earth.
Inside, water had pooled into puddles everywhere, turning the place into pure chaos.」
They were only sitting in LN Entertainment's grand conference hall, yet the actors immersed themselves, visualizing every line of the stage directions.
An elderly supporting actor in the second row opened the scene.
"Quiet! We now begin the trial of the outsider."
The marketplace din of the hall fell silent in an instant.
Clank!
As the man who looked like a prisoner was hauled to the center, every eye inside the building fixed on him.
Everyone except the newcomer wore red. In place of the red-clad red blood cells, the supporting actors in the second row began their lines.
"So that's the outsider, huh."
"I've never seen an outsider before."
"Well, Aunt Nora says this flood is all because of him."
The elderly actor playing the judge raised a hand high amid the murmuring crowd.
The script said he drew a sword and lifted it, so his fingers curled as if gripping something.
"The cause of the great rain that struck our village is the arrival of this outsider. Therefore, the outsider is sentenced to death!"
Then a bright, clear voice cut through the supporting actors' noise and rang across the hall.
"Wait a minute! We still haven't proven any connection between the outsider's arrival and the flood!"
It was only a single line, yet the projection was excellent.
Yeon-woo glanced sideways at the girl named Han Byeol sitting beside him.
Young, but her voice is solid. Not bad at all.
The girl character "Ella" appeared from the first episode all the way through the series finale in episode twelve—a major role—so they would have put real care into the casting.
Hearing Han Byeol as Ella, another supporting actor in the second row raised a hand, and the elderly actor delivered the next line.
"The one who raised a hand—speak."
"Yes, Your Honor. I saw with my own eyes that Ella has been bringing food to that outsider while he was locked up! She must have grown attached."
"Is that true?"
Several more exchanges followed between Ella, defending the protagonist Jeong Do-jin, and the judge determined to execute him.
At last the turn arrived for the series lead himself—Jeong Do-jin, played by Yeon-woo.
Doctor Jeong Do-jin had entered the world inside the body to cure his younger sibling's leukemia. From the start he was a being of an entirely different order from the cells that lived there.
He possessed more than enough strength to snap the chains coiled around him and stroll out whenever he pleased, yet for certain reasons he was deliberately allowing himself to remain captive.
The protagonist finds this whole trial so tedious that his baseline psychology needs a touch of arrogance underneath.
And to heal his sibling completely, he had to reach the very top of this world.
Higher than the sky.
The supreme central organ that integrated the entire nervous system.
He had to cross dimensions again and again until he reached the brain of this world.
So there should be a little anger simmering inside him too. He's in a hurry, and this is just getting in the way.
Arrogant, and angry on top of it.
Yet because he was the protagonist, he could not come across as purely negative on screen.
Do-jin will feel a flicker of interest in why this red blood cell named Ella is defending an outsider like him. I'll wrap the surface of the lines with that.
In an instant Yeon-woo sank into Jeong Do-jin and opened his mouth.
"Village chief."
The voice that emerged was heavy and viscous—the complete opposite of the Ryu Yeon-woo everyone knew.
It was a voice that seemed to dominate the entire space in a single breath.
The unexpected quality drew every actor's gaze as if by magnetism.
"You claim my arrival is the cause of this disaster. In that case, wouldn't the best solution be for me to leave this place quietly?"
Come to think of it, the script said "judge," not "village chief."
Listening to Yeon-woo's line, Writer Kim Jin-ju gave a small nod and jotted a note on her script.
Of course. The Jeong Do-jin of the story wouldn't care whether some old man in a tiny red-blood-cell village was a judge or a village chief.
She was impressed by the boldness of altering the stage directions from the very first line of his first scene.
And given the situation, "village chief" simply sounded more natural.
"What? Impossible. If you go elsewhere, you'll only bring disaster there as well."
"Then this will be the place where I die. That fact won't change even after a hundred years, so this land will remain cursed forever."
At Do-jin's words the red-clad villagers stirred.
"He's right. If a cursed outsider dies here, the place stays cursed forever, doesn't it?"
"Yeah. I think it'd be better if he just left quietly."
As the murmuring swelled, the village chief's eyebrows twitched and he drew his sword again.
"Silence! Are you being toyed with by the three-inch tongue of a cursed man? That is not the will of the gods."
Thud-thud.
In that moment Do-jin tensed his body; the chains wrapped tightly around him shattered into fragments and clattered to the floor.
"That is not the will of the gods? And you claim to understand the will of the gods? A mere country village chief?"
"W-what are you all doing? Restrain him again!"
"You're a rather amusing cell."
An indescribable aura rose like heat haze from Do-jin's body after he broke the chains.
Sensing a presence of an entirely different order, the red blood cells froze the way rabbits freeze before a tiger.
Then a woman's voice, mixed with a sigh and the crackle of radio static, reached Do-jin's ear.
Crackle!
At last it was Jeong Su-yeon's turn to appear—voice only—as the narrator.
"—You don't have time to chat leisurely with a low-level cell like that. Hurry up and leave! The White Blood Army will be here any moment."
"Got it. I'm going, I'm going."
While climbing as far as Femoral he had shaken off pursuing White Blood Army units, raising his wanted level; he had deliberately let himself be captured in the prison of this remote red-blood-cell village to reset it.
Just then the assistant director called out loudly.
"One wall collapses! Rumble!"
According to the script, the White Blood Army was about to appear through the crumbling wall.
"Already?"
Androids of dull silver metal.
Anyone could see they did not belong to the surrounding era.
"Kyaaaah! Run!"
"Out of the way! Open the door!"
Screams from the supporting cast filled the air, conjuring the atmosphere of pure pandemonium.
At the same time the mechanical android White Blood Army units locked onto Do-jin and leapt to attack.
Clang—!
With a metallic crash Do-jin caught the flying White Blood Army arm bare-handed, seized the unit in front of him with his other hand, and hurled it hard toward a side empty of red blood cells.
Then, with fluid movement, he slipped past the oncoming attacks and exited the courtroom through the wall they had smashed open.
The narrator's voice returned.
"—You mustn't kill the White Blood Army! If the danger rating that dropped while you were hiding in prison goes back up, it'll be a real headache."
Of course the stage directions said so; in reality the conference hall remained perfectly quiet.
Yet Yeon-woo's voice came out as if he were truly being chased and fighting for his life, breathing hard.
"I know! Hup—I know!"
Hearing him split his breath with such precision, the other actors felt the scenes written in the script play out vividly inside their own heads.
As Do-jin shouted urgently and headed for the center of the village, a voice called from behind.
It was Han Byeol as Ella.
"Mister! This way! The iron horse you came on!"
When he looked back, Ella was frantically waving him over.
Do-jin changed direction and accelerated toward her; Ella sprinted into an alley as if guiding him.
"It's inside that stable!"
This was the very scene Yeon-woo had practiced in the spare time before the housewarming party.
The scene he had immersed himself in alone, sitting on a stool in the home practice room as if astride a captured White Blood Army magnetic-levitation bike.
He scrambled on and was about to start the engine when Ella hopped up behind him without hesitation.
"What? Why are you following me?"
"Take me with you!"
At Ella's blunt demand Do-jin frowned.
"I'm in a hurry. No dead weight."
"Hey! I fed you! I have to earn my keep!"
Yeon-woo and Han Byeol traded lines as if their gears meshed perfectly.
The chemistry was so good that soft exclamations of admiration rose around them.
Rumble.
Before long the pursuing White Blood Army smashed through the stable wall; there was no more time to delay.
Whiiirrr—
With a drive sound the engine ignited and the bike lifted lightly into the air.
Left with no choice, Do-jin took off.
"Hold on tight!"
"Okay!"
The bike carrying Do-jin and Ella weaved through the red-clad red blood cells running in panic and the attacks of the chasing White Blood Army, racing out of the village.
"Do you even know where I'm going?"
"Up there!"
Seeing Ella's finger point at the sky, Do-jin shook his head.
"And where did you hear that?"
"I went to deliver oxygen as far as Femoral and overheard some men coming out of a tavern. They said a man climbing against the sky was coming up from Fibula."
In truth the man who had come up from Fibula—the shinbone—was himself.
But Jeong Do-jin had not started from the calf; he had come from even lower.
From the very bottom of this world—the tips of the toes.
Do-jin sighed, looked up at the sky, and spoke to the narrator who would be somewhere far above—or even higher still.
"Narrator. So once I get past the thigh, there's a direct route straight to the heart?"
"—To Cardiac."
"Cardiac means the heart, I know."
Every place name in this world worked that way.
The heart was Cardiac.
The thigh was Femoral.
The shinbone was Fibula.
Because the place names were taken straight from medical terminology, Jeong Do-jin—whose real profession was medicine—could tell exactly how far he had come.
Watching Do-jin converse with the narrator, Ella riding behind him tilted her head.
"Mister, who are you talking to?"
"Why am I a 'mister'?"
"If it's the road to Cardiac, I know it."
"What? You know it?"
At that moment the real-world assistant director called out.
"All right, we'll cut here and continue later. Thank you for your hard work, everyone."
Only then did the actors surface from the immersive world inside the body and return to reality.
They stretched, then began chatting with the people beside them.
"Wow… Ryu Yeon-woo really is on another level. My lines finished ages ago, but I was holding my breath the whole time watching him."
"That kid Han Byeol's no joke either. Think you could trade banter with Actor Ryu like that?"
"No way. He'd eat every one of my timing cues."
They were nowhere near CG, not even on a set.
It wasn't even a shoot—just a script reading. The actors who had expected to struggle immersing themselves in an unfamiliar fantasy genre found themselves having the strange experience of sitting in chairs reading lines while full scenes played out inside their heads.
"Honestly, when I heard it was fantasy in Korea I thought it was a reckless challenge… but maybe it could actually work…?"
Listening to those supporting actors' voices from the back row, Hollywood's rising CG director Jeong Yo-han adjusted his glasses and smiled quietly.