The Private Audition
Of everyone present, it was Jeong Cheol-min who was most thoroughly rattled by what had just happened.
The sheer, crushing sorrow rolling off the boy in front of him was so overwhelming that Cheol-min's first thought was that something had gone terribly wrong. He pulled Yeon-woo into a rough embrace, at a complete loss for what else to do.
"What in the world is this? A young man—no, not even that. A kid. What kind of grief does a kid carry that makes him break down sobbing like this the second he's asked?"
At that point, Cheol-min genuinely couldn't tell whether Yeon-woo was simply an acting genius, or whether—exactly as the colleague who'd taught him the technique had claimed—some buried pain had finally cracked open and was pouring out all its negative energy at once.
Even if it was the latter, immersion this fast still earned the title of genius without the slightest exaggeration.
Of course, weeping freely and expressing emotion as performance inside a frame were two entirely different crafts. But Ryu Yeon-woo was an ordinary civilian who had walked in that very day saying he wanted to learn acting for the first time.
A long while later, once Yeon-woo had more or less composed himself, he apologized to Jeong Cheol-min.
"I'm truly sorry, Teacher. I didn't mean to—it just came over me all of a sudden…"
"Don't be ridiculous. I was the one who told you to express sadness."
Cheol-min waved the apology off at once.
He had been about to call it a day, but Yeon-woo's blazing enthusiasm pulled him into one test after another. By the end of them, Jeong Cheol-min had reached a conclusion.
This kid was born to walk this path.
There were still plenty of rough edges, of course—but the Ryu Yeon-woo that Cheol-min had just witnessed was a genius.
He could freely control even the finest facial muscles an actor needed. Give him a role—a limping beggar, a thief, a wastrel, a new-money upstart, a soldier—and he somehow caught every subtle trait of the type and even managed to reproduce the atmosphere unique to that profession.
Cheol-min had no way of knowing it, but more than a decade of life-or-death undercover work across countless black operations had simply melted into the performances Yeon-woo was laying out.
Turning raw material this fresh into a finished dish ready for the camera would still require technique, craft, and countless fine adjustments. But if Cheol-min failed to shape a talent of this caliber, every year he had poured into acting would look pitiful by comparison.
And so the rumor began to spread through the academy: the director had taken on a monster of a private student.
Prosecutor Han Hae-un of the Busan District Prosecutors' Office.
Han Hae-un was a man who had lived with single-minded ferocity, aiming for nothing but a career in the law.
Perhaps he had lived too fiercely. One day, mid-shift, he collapsed from a hemorrhagic stroke and was rushed to the emergency room.
The doctors tried everything, then shook their heads and said it was already too late. And then, miraculously, he came back.
Even the hospital staff had no choice but to call his revival a miracle.
Hae-un took it as heaven's will that he finish the work left undone, and threw himself into his duties as a Busan prosecutor with even greater intensity.
At first, it was only a dream.
A dream so unnervingly vivid he kept wondering whether it could possibly be real.
From the day he collapsed onward, the same dream returned again and again.
A conversation with a man called Team Leader Jeon Su-hwan—always the same exchange, every single time.
Talk of how, if he died, he had arranged to donate everything to some welfare organization.
Hae-un dismissed it at first. But as the dream kept repeating, curiosity grew. On a hunch, he started digging into it in his spare time.
He began by searching for anyone named Jeon Su-hwan who held the title of team leader. The country was full of them.
And so, whenever he had a free moment, Han Hae-un found himself combing through endless lists of Jeon Su-hwans.
Dreaming of the man every night was enough to drive anyone half mad.
Then, months later, a chill ran straight down Hae-un's spine. He turned a page and there, in the personal information, was the face he had seen in the dream.
The Team Leader Jeon Su-hwan he found was listed as an ordinary employee at a water-purifier trading company.
A résumé and a life with no point of contact to Hae-un's own.
But finding the man from the dream in the real world made coincidence impossible to accept. Hae-un began a proper investigation.
The deeper he dug, the deeper the mystery became.
At first he trusted the digital records listing the man as a regular employee of an ordinary water-purifier firm, called the company directly, and asked. The answer came back: no such person existed.
Half a year slipped by. Yeon-woo never fell outside the top three in his class—not on the finals, not on the midterms of the following semester. And in acting, he absorbed everything like a sponge. Jeong Cheol-min had already run out of things left to teach him.
"Yeon-woo."
"Yes, Teacher."
"An old university senior of mine just took on a drama for a general programming channel. He says it's a college romance-comedy based on a webtoon."
A few days earlier, at a drinking gathering of his film-school classmates, Cheol-min had heard that Senior Kim Han-su's production company was putting out feelers through the big academies where a few of their classmates taught, and through theater departments where others held professorships, looking for new faces for a closed drama audition.
"The leads are already cast, but they're holding private auditions for a few supporting roles, including some smaller parts. If you're interested, I can put in a word."
Kim Han-su PD was the kind of senior whose atmosphere made him hard to approach, so he didn't have much contact with the juniors—but with the easygoing Jeong Cheol-min he had always maintained a relatively warm relationship.
In the past, Cheol-min's academy had regularly received invitations to closed auditions. Then, for several years running, his students had spectacularly bombed every one of them. The academy had gradually been pushed down the priority list, and eventually the audition notices stopped coming at all.
"I'd love that. If you can just open the door for me, I'll be ready."
"I never got married, but if I had a son like you, I'd have nothing left to wish for. I'm jealous of Cheol-ung hyung-nim. Really jealous."
Cheol-min grinned at Yeon-woo's boundless energy.
Over the six months of coaching Yeon-woo, Cheol-min and Yeon-woo's father, Cheol-ung, had unexpectedly hit it off. They drank together now and then, and—sharing the same first syllable in their given names despite different surnames—had started calling each other brothers.
"Come on, Teacher. You're basically my uncle by now."
Yeon-woo teased him lightly.
In truth, he was deeply grateful to Jeong Cheol-min, who poured out his talent for Yeon-woo's sake without holding anything back.
"Well, if you make it big, maybe this academy will get a little life back into it too."
Cheol-min always taught with full passion, but the number of aspiring actors walking through the academy doors had been shrinking by the day.
The trend of everyone flocking to the famous Seoul academies only seemed to be getting stronger.
In that climate, Ryu Yeon-woo was the academy's one and only hope.
Grinning, Cheol-min stuck up a thumb and added,
"Anyway, I'll take that as a yes and talk to the director. Personally, with your looks and your skill, I figure you're already in—but let's prepare for this like we mean it."
"Yes. Understood."
The following Monday morning.
The line rang, then connected. A neat, precise voice came through.
Hearing Kim Han-su PD's voice on the other end, Cheol-min answered in his usual warm, easy tone.
"Senior, aigoo—how have you been? Last time I saw you was at Gyeong-jun's wedding. It's been far too long."
"Yes, Senior. The reason I'm calling—I heard you've started on a new project?"
Kim Han-su was the rare sort who used formal speech with everyone, including juniors as distant as Cheol-min. He preferred conversations that got straight to the point.
Remembering that about his senior, Jeong Cheol-min cut directly to business.
His crisp speech and personality could make him seem cold, but Kim Han-su PD was one of those directors who moved freely between film and drama and had a gift for drawing out warm, youthful sensibilities.
"Yes, Senior. Lately I've been raising a student with real ambition, and he's genuinely exceptional. Would it be possible to send him to the closed audition for the supporting and minor roles?"
"Of course, Senior. Once this project wraps, how about a drink with Jung-cheol hyung for the first time in a while?"
"Yes, Senior. Thank you. Take care."
Grinning ear to ear, Jeong Cheol-min forgot that Yeon-woo was still in class and almost called him—then caught himself and sent a message instead.
Yeon-woo had just finished PE. Holding his breath against the locker-room stench of the classroom, he was changing clothes when his phone screen lit up. He opened it and checked the message.
"Yes!"
Yeon-woo pumped a fist.
Kim Jun-su, mid-change beside him, looked over in confusion.
"What? What are you so happy about? Let me be happy with you."
"I'll tell you if it works out."
Yeon-woo laughed it off. He hadn't even passed yet—no point getting ahead of himself.
"What do you mean, 'if it works out'? Is it a girl?"
Woo Seong-sik, standing next to Jun-su, grinned and needled him.
As if.
Yeon-woo said nothing. He just met their eyes and smiled.
Tuesday afternoon, the moment school let out, Yeon-woo headed straight for the academy.
"Teacher! I'm here."
Watching Yeon-woo burst through the door in a rush, Cheol-min laughed.
"Couldn't wait for the final bell, could you? Flew straight over."
"I was dying to know what the script was about."
Yeon-woo answered with a grin.
Across both his past life and this one, he couldn't remember the last time he had looked forward to something this much.
Jeong Cheol-min had received the script that morning. The audition was five days away—Sunday.
They had definitely gotten it later than everyone else.
But as long as there was enough time to properly absorb the material, holding onto a script longer didn't magically improve the result.
"If you want to call the prep time tight, it's tight. If you want to call it enough, it's enough."
"So the real key is character interpretation."
"Exactly. With rom-coms, most supporting roles are pretty flat characters, so it shouldn't be too hard. Here—take this."
Cheol-min handed Yeon-woo the script.
"You'll need to know the script before you can analyze it, so read it first. I'll be in Practice Room 3 working with the college-prep class. If anything confuses you, come ask."
"Yes. Thank you."
Once Cheol-min left, Yeon-woo was alone in the director's office. He sank into the script.
The title of the project Ryu Yeon-woo would be auditioning for was Summer's Closet.
It was based on a webtoon—and Yeon-woo, of course, had never read a webtoon in his life.
Reading this one for the audition was his first time.
If I'd known it would come to this, I should've read more comics while I was alive, he thought—then snorted a quiet laugh.
The hunger for acting had always been there. But for an orphan scraping by, for a spy, for a field operative, a leisurely hobby like comics had been a luxury. And who could have predicted reincarnation into an aspiring actor?
Yeon-woo shook the thoughts away and buried himself in the script.