Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (1)
"A child actor, you say?"
The lady tilted her head. Maybe it was true that parents and children shared the same blood, because her reaction was exactly Seo Yu-rin's, word for word. She turned to Yu-rin, puzzled, and asked,
"Yu-rin, sweetie, you know how to act?"
"Yep!"
Seo Yu-rin nodded with total confidence. The lady looked over at Father.
"A child actor for what production, exactly? Auditions for any decent drama or film require prior experience, don't they?"
"That's usually true when it's not an open casting call, but this time it's a little unusual."
"Forgive me for being blunt, but is this information actually reliable?"
Seo Yu-rin would be starting elementary school soon. If she ended up on some trashy program, it could follow her as a lifetime source of mockery. That worry was plain in the lady's eyes.
Frankly, I'd been thinking the same thing.
What could Father possibly be in a position to know?
My father worked at KES, the biggest broadcasting station in South Korea. Of course, since I was young, Father was young too.
Around this point, he should be working as a second on the filming crew.
To be precise, he was the photography staff, the guy shooting promotional material. If Father knew about it, it was safe to assume every single person at KES knew about it. I couldn't imagine the higher-ups letting someone like him in on anything important, which meant there had to be more to the story than he was letting on.
Father mumbled over his words for a moment, weighing something, then finally came clean.
"It's not exactly a secret anymore, so I'll just say it — this project is Director Shi Yeon-seo's."
"Director Shi Yeon-seo?! The director of Byeolhae — that Shi Yeon-seo?!"
"Pffuh?!"
The name came out of nowhere, at the worst possible moment, and I spat out the cracker I'd been chewing.
"Eee, Tae-oh, stay still, stay still."
Seo Yu-rin scrambled over, grabbed the wet wipes, and dabbed at my mouth. Getting my face wiped while a seven-year-old told me to hold still — was there any humiliation greater than this?
"Oh my, Tae-oh, you know Director Shi Yeon-seo too?"
"…I've seen him on TV before."
As if I wouldn't know him.
In my past life, I'd actually worked under Director Shi Yeon-seo. Not that I could say that out loud unless I wanted to be treated like a lunatic, so I fudged it. Thankfully, the adults didn't seem particularly suspicious.
Father went on.
"Director Shi is planning a new drama, and apparently he hasn't found a child actor he likes. He's threatened to halt filming if he can't cast one, and right now the entire station is in an uproar over it."
"Oh dear."
"So an official memo's been circulated through the whole station. Anyone who can act, any child at all, bring them in first and ask questions later. That's why I brought it up."
"Hmm… if it's Director Shi Yeon-seo, I don't suppose there's much to worry about, but…"
Director Shi Yeon-seo.
In my past life, he had won every major film award the world had to offer, and for years he was the Korean filmmaker holding the megaphone in Hollywood — a master among masters. At this point in time, he'd released one Ten-Million Movie a year for four consecutive years, an unprecedented run of blockbusters that had, for all practical purposes, elevated him into the realm of living myth in Korea. In this country, not knowing who Shi Yeon-seo was could get you accused of being a spy.
But hold on — had Director Shi Yeon-seo ever filmed a drama in Korea at this point in time?
He hadn't.
No. Absolutely not.
The word "drama" didn't exist anywhere in that man's filmography, not even once.
Call it devotion — as a fan in one life and a subordinate who resented him in another — but I knew his filmography by heart, every line of it.
In fact, around this time he should have been prepping a film shoot in Hollywood.
Which meant the drama Father was talking about was a project that, in my previous life, had already fallen apart before it ever got off the ground.
Father pressed the point hard. "It's worth a try, at least."
"In the end, I suppose it comes down to what Yu-rin wants…"
The lady turned to look at Seo Yu-rin. Yu-rin, blissfully oblivious to all of it, was curled up in my lap, poking at my cheek with one fingertip as she sat on my thigh.
"Yu-rin, what would you like to do?"
Seo Yu-rin blinked a few times. Every gaze in the room settled on her. Four pairs of adult eyes, and mine, all fixed on her — and then she tilted her head back until her eyes met mine.
"Tae-oh."
"Yeah."
"Could I do it?"
I closed my eyes.
The talent was already guaranteed. Seo Yu-rin had proven her worth in my past life by climbing all the way to the very top of the Korean industry.
But if that were all there was to it, I would have shaken my head. Because in my past life, Seo Yu-rin had chased acting to the very end — and then chosen to end her own life for reasons no one ever understood.
And yet I had already seen it. Seen it with my own eyes.
『Who in this whole world is the most beautiful?』
Her acting had been breathtaking — flawless, overwhelming, beautiful past the point of suffocation. And the smile she'd worn while doing it, genuinely happy, genuinely delighted, burned itself into me.
Even if I shook my head here and now, a person called Seo Yu-rin would inevitably stand in front of a camera someday.
『Don't ever leave me.』
And I had been the one to say those words to her.
She probably had no idea — but somehow, some way, I wanted to keep that promise for her. And on a far more selfish note, I wanted to see this girl's true acting on the screen, something the woman of my past life had never once given me.
I patted Seo Yu-rin's head. Her soft hair tangled around my fingertips and then slipped loose like strands of silk.
"Waaang? Waaeeeng…"
Startled at first, Yu-rin quickly decided she liked it and leaned her whole body into me. I had no idea what had happened to this girl in my past life, and honestly I still had no clue what I was supposed to do about it —
but hey, it beats dying, doesn't it?
Whatever way the past changed from here, the ending waiting for her could never be worse than the future where she took her own life.
I gave her my honest answer.
"You can."
"Yeah! Then I'll do it!"
There wasn't a shred of hesitation. Seo Yu-rin sprang out of my lap like a general raising the signal for war, and thrust her fist high into the air.
"Child actor!"
Child actors.
Exactly what it sounds like — children who act. Naturally, any director would rather fill a production with adult actors: obedient, easy to communicate with, sharp enough to take a hint. But depending on the project, kids are simply indispensable.
The protagonist's childhood, or the protagonist's son or daughter — those were the usual cases.
And, quite obviously, those kids can't act. So in practice, casting prioritizes looks above all else; as long as the performance is passable, they let it slide. Good acting from a child is just a bonus.
"…At this point, can't we just take literally anyone?"
Having just sent out rejection number two hundred sixty-seven, the casting director collapsed over his desk as though he'd fainted. The mountain of paperwork piled up around him was, for all intents and purposes, a mountain of corpses — every last one of them failing to clear Shi Yeon-seo's bar.
They'd scraped together the child actors from every halfway respectable acting academy and entertainment agency in Korea, even the idol trainees in the right age range, and Shi Yeon-seo's answer had never changed.
"No."
"Ghk, hck…"
The casting director suddenly understood why people committed murder today. Fury kept boiling up from the base of his skull.
Handsome boys, pretty girls? He could find those by the dozen. Among them, ones who could actually act? Rarer than hen's teeth, but surely if he raked through this entire peninsula, there'd be at least one like that in some acting academy.
"What exactly does an actor with 'genius' look like?!"
But this — this was impossible.
Genius.
Where on earth was he supposed to dredge up something so vague, so utterly without a defined standard?
Utterly indifferent to his suffering, Shi Yeon-seo yawned lazily.
"I said exactly what I meant."
"Hk, hkahk…!"
"I take it your health is poor."
"You — you—"
The director's gaze, brimming with what looked like heartfelt concern, sent the casting director's blood pressure soaring even higher. It's because of YOU, you— he almost snapped, then decided there was no point and squeezed his eyes shut.
Why is he this obsessed with a child actor who only appears in a single episode?!
Were geniuses all people who'd traded their talent for their humanity at some crossroads? Starting with the great actors he knew personally, right down to this man in front of him — not a single one of them was a properly functioning human being.
His honest preference would have been to raise both hands, declare he wanted no part of this, and vanish into his stockpiled vacation days. But this drama was one the highest powers at KES were all watching closely, so even that was off the table. In this industry, it was practically an established law of nature that investing in Shi Yeon-seo repaid you several times over.
There's really nothing left to try.
They'd circulated a memo through the entire company and hunted high and low for child actors, but today was the last day of even that. The casting director rubbed at his aching chest and checked the clock. In a few minutes would begin what was, for all practical purposes, their final audition. Shi Yeon-seo, leafing through today's list of candidates, raised a question.
"And who is this child?"
Director Shi shook a sheet of paper entirely blank of acting credits.
Aside from the name Seo Yu-rin, the resume was so clean it might as well have been a blank notebook page.
"An internal referral. She's got a lovely face, so I accepted her just in case."
"…"
"…You hate everything I bring you. A man drowning has to grab at straws, doesn't he?"
"I never said I hated them. I merely assumed it was a clerical error."
Director Shi stared at Seo Yu-rin's ID photo with blank, unreadable eyes. Even through the photograph, the vitality unique to a small child leapt out at him — along with an overwhelming, almost violent beauty.
Pretty, isn't she.
She was, undeniably. Even among the other applicants, most of whom had real child-acting experience under their belts, she stood apart from all the rest. And yet it wasn't enough to catch Shi Yeon-seo's interest.
Children were, at the end of the day, blessed creatures — you could bring in any child off the street and someone would coo, how adorable~. The advantage that came with looks carried very little weight here.
What Shi Yeon-seo wanted was one thing, and one thing only: overflowing, uncontainable genius.
"As it happens, she's first in line today."
This was entirely the casting director's design. Stack the schedule early with the weakest kids possible, and let the ones afterward shine at least a little brighter by comparison.
Ding—
A chime rang out, marking the hour. Through the walls came the sound of staff bustling about outside. The children would be filing in one by one now.
Just please, please, let anyone do. Somebody save my life.
Click—
The door opened, and the casting director straightened up in his seat. And in that very instant, a child poked her head in through the gap.
"Hello!"
"Uh, hm. Hello there?"
If you're coming in, come all the way in — why stick in just your face? The casting director returned the greeting awkwardly.
Then again, she really is one of the prettiest kids I've ever seen…
Which was the problem, since something like that would never satisfy Director Shi Yeon-seo.
Seo Yu-rin beamed and asked,
"Um, can I come in with someone else?"
"Of course. Bring them right in."
The casting director nodded. These were kids of, at most, seven years old. How nervous must they be, being judged in front of strangers? Parents and teachers accompanying children into a child-actor audition was the most ordinary thing in the world.
"Okay! Let's go in!"
"…Haah."
What came in alongside Seo Yu-rin was a boy named Tae-oh, who looked thoroughly exhausted. No need to even watch — that one's a rejection.
The moment the casting director stole a glance at Shi Yeon-seo, however, he froze in shock.
"Ha."
Director Shi — the man whose expression never, ever changed — was smiling faintly at the two children. And it was, strangely enough, the pure, guileless smile of a little boy who'd just been handed a present.
"Welcome, everyone."