A Day Off at Chicken Baekga
Several scenes were shot back-to-back, and a holiday appeared on the schedule.
No matter how many of my scenes had piled up, they were nothing compared to the three leads' workload, and with barely a single NG between them, filming had progressed quickly.
In my case especially, there was a stretch where I had to commute in the assistant director's van, so my scenes tended to get clumped onto the same day.
If we wrapped a whole day's worth of filming in one go, that meant the next day was free.
"Son!"
And so, enjoying my first day off in ages, I clocked in at my father's restaurant.
I wanted to help my parents out, even a little.
Truthfully, I used to hate showing up at Dad's shop.
It was exhausting, tedious, and I wasn't even getting paid for it.
Thinking back on it now, I was really young then.
Just being able to spend time together like this was happiness enough.
Besides, even this wouldn't last forever.
Once I made my proper debut, casually dropping by my father's restaurant wouldn't be so easy anymore.
For a small shop like Dad's, a sudden crowd of customers could actually be poison.
Knowing his personality, he wouldn't want that kind of advertising boost anyway.
So I planned to keep the fact that my father ran a restaurant hidden for as long as possible.
And if that was the goal, then obviously I couldn't be showing up at the shop either.
"How's business?"
"Eh, it's a neighborhood joint. What do you expect?"
My father's chicken restaurant, Chicken Baekga, was a classic market-style whole chicken place.
It wasn't a franchise, so it had some price advantage, but since Dad was responsible for absolutely everything himself, it meant endless busywork and pointless scrambling.
On top of that, it started out with a definite disadvantage in name recognition.
Nobody goes hunting around for some obscure chicken place just to eat one bird, right? Too much hassle.
People just order from the nearest franchise and call it a day.
Granted, these days franchise chicken has gotten so pricey that there's a decent argument we could compete after all.
"Oh, it's the chicken place's eldest son."
"Takes after his dad — such a handsome boy."
"Doesn't he? Haha."
"Hello, everyone."
The moment I stepped inside, the shop's three meager tables had already been seized by the Married Hiking Club Alliance.
True to any neighborhood business, small social gatherings cropped up here from time to time, and the hiking club alliance in particular was a vital customer base keeping our shop afloat.
Without these ladies, our business would've been a good deal bleaker.
The group gathered today was one even I knew well.
They'd been regulars so long that they'd graduated from customers to friends of the family.
Case in point: my own mother was sitting right there among them.
Watching Dad drift over to their table whenever he had a spare second, completely absorbed in gossip, I decided he needed a proper break — I'd handle tonight's service myself.
"Hm? You will?"
"Yep, so today you just sit and chat with your friends."
"Well... I don't know about that..."
"Come on, it's not like I'm going far. If it gets busy, I'll holler for help."
"Then... all right, I suppose."
Having sent my father back to the table — a rare act of filial devotion on my part — I got to frying chickens the moment orders came in.
Truth be told, frying chicken isn't exactly difficult.
Dad had done all the prep already, and our menu consisted of exactly one item: fried chicken.
Drop it in on schedule, pull it out on schedule. There was no room for error.
It wasn't like we were some viral hotspot with orders stacking up into the stratosphere.
I just had to fry chicken at a leisurely pace and wait for customers, with the aunties' chatter as my side dish.
"Oh my, apparently that show's all the rage these days. Yoon Seo-eun."
"Mm, I watch it live every week."
"Honestly, nothing much happens plot-wise, but it's got this addictive edge to it."
"You watch it for the eye candy, obviously. Manager Seo — Jo Yooshin — and Assistant Manager Jung — Rion."
"Right, right, you've got a point there."
"But there's no fluttery romance at all. I wish Seo-eun would just latch onto Manager Seo already."
"Oh please, forget Manager Seo. The smooth, sweet Assistant Manager Jung is the obvious pick."
"Though looking at it so far, I don't see a single bud about to bloom anywhere."
"Aish, who does romance at the office? If they did, nothing would get done."
"Everyone multitasks these days. Only an idiot can't."
"Excuse me? Are you saying that to my face? My single-as-they-come son?"
"Yes, yes — you didn't fail, you simply chose not to. Sure, sure."
It veered off in a strange direction at the end, but apparently Genius Copywriter, Yoon Seo-eun was popular even among the middle-aged crowd.
The two lead-tier supporting players, Rion and Jo Yooshin, were enjoying quite a bit of goodwill too.
Well, fair enough. Those two were strikingly handsome.
But true to K-drama-poisoned middle-aged viewers everywhere, they seemed a little frustrated that the romance line hadn't ignited yet.
What could I say, though? Wait all you like — no romance is coming.
If Seo-eun and Rion's romance had been included as originally planned, would reactions have been better?
On the flip side, younger viewers were saying they preferred the current lean, romance-free direction, so it didn't seem like a question with a clear right answer.
"Oh my, look, that gentleman is on."
"Ah, Elder Yoon."
"I actually called my dad the second I saw him on screen."
"You too? So did I, actually."
"He reminded me of my grandfather. Grandpa used to look at me with exactly those eyes."
"Well, there was never anyone like Grandpa. Infinite love, that man."
"My grandfather was exactly like that. So dignified, so handsome..."
"Oh come on, he couldn't have been that impressive. That's just nostalgia talking."
"He was! It's the truth!"
A rerun of the drama just happened to be playing on the shop's TV — the scene where Elder Yoon speaks with Yoon Seo-eun in the park.
Watching the aunties chatter away about how Elder Yoon embracing Seo-eun with the warmest eyes in the world reminded them of their fathers or grandfathers, I couldn't help thinking: I acted that well, huh.
"Oh, but you know there's this rumor going around about that actor? Apparently he's not actually an old man."
"Huh? What on earth are you talking about?"
"My daughter told me it's all over the internet. They say it's all makeup and the real person underneath is in his twenties or something?"
"Pfft. What nonsense is that? Anyone with eyes can see he's in his seventies."
"Aish, makeup technology is so advanced these days, they say a twenty-something could totally pass for seventy."
"Well... now that you mention it, that gentleman is remarkably well-preserved for his age, isn't he?"
"Plenty of men his age have had work done. Pump yourself full of enough procedures and that's what you get."
Mid-fry, I paused to savor this delightful tidbit.
PD Yoo was finally loosening the lid on the sauce, and it seemed the internet was already buzzing with all manner of speculation about Elder Yoon's true identity.
PD Yoo had wanted the reporters and netizens to dig up the truth on their own rather than have the production announce it.
It would land harder and be far more effective that way, he'd said.
That process was exactly this rumor.
The classic "insider scoop." The calculation was that once a rumor spread like this, public attention would zero in, and obsessive diggers would emerge to pick the story apart.
At that stage, security would quietly loosen, the photos we'd taken in advance would get released, articles would be written, and when the reporters came swarming — only then would we grudgingly "admit" what we'd been planning to reveal all along.
PD Yoo really was a fun one, as always.
"Aish, they say the actor's name is Baek Si-woo. Baek Si-woo in his twenties? Then he'd be about my son's age!"
"Does that even make sense?"
"Exactly. Absolutely impossible."
As the wild theories about Elder Yoon's identity flew around, my father — who'd been listening silently the whole time — stepped in and closed the case.
Declaring that Elder Yoon being in his twenties was pure absurdity.
For now, everyone laughed it off, but someday, if that prophecy came true, it would be quite a sight to behold.
Just imagining the expression Dad would wear in that moment was enough to make me struggle to keep a straight face.
"Good work today, son."
"Ah, it was nothing. Though there was more to it than I expected."
"Haha, that's business for you. And today was actually on the quiet side."
On the way home after closing up the shop, my father rubbed my shoulders and told me I'd done well.
I'd insisted it was nothing, but honestly, it had been tough.
I'd underestimated a little chicken shop, but the work was no joke.
If this was the easy day, what kind of battles did my father fight on the hard ones?
The more I thought about it, the more I felt Dad's restaurant was perfect exactly as it was.
A scale where he could enjoy the business while chatting with his regulars, like today — that was just right. Any busier, and I didn't see the upside.
Money was my job now anyway.
With that resolve firm in my chest, I headed home alongside my father.
With the blood relation between Elder Yoon and Yoon Seo-eun — something originally meant to be revealed in the drama's latter half — now exposed early, my performance direction shifted as well.
The old Elder Yoon had simply soothed people through their inner struggles; now he'd transformed into a fixer who personally resolved the company's external problems.
That said, he'd remained surprisingly reasonable for a character introduced with such a ruthless first impression.
Secretly acquiring shares of Planet, say. Or courting the major shareholders into his camp.
And gently applying pressure to a corporate rep from the client side who'd been filing bad-faith claims.
Judging by the atmosphere, I'd half expected him to hire a hitman and personally lynch Planet's rotten personnel — but apparently even Writer Min balked at going that far.
"If this were noir or an action flick, it would've gone there one hundred percent. Though breaking into Yoon Seo-eun's apartment to confirm the blood relation already puts it pretty far into makjang territory..."
As an aside, I once asked the writer whether the scene where Elder Yoon dispatches someone to check Yoon Seo-eun's home to verify their blood relation was really necessary.
Wouldn't a simple DNA test make more sense than all that?
Her answer: a grandfather and granddaughter cannot have their kinship confirmed through genetic testing.
She said that was why she'd once considered casting a veteran actress as Elder Yoon.
Every veteran actress who could plausibly match Yoon Seo-eun visually had scheduling conflicts, so the role had landed on a grandfather out of necessity — and the script had been revised accordingly. I could hardly nod along harder.
That was completely new information to me, and she'd researched it in advance down to that level of detail.
Screenwriting really wasn't a job just anyone could do, it seemed.
Even after Elder Yoon's role expanded, though, I still felt like I was operating on a separate track.
Like I was shooting a different drama entirely, all by myself.
The leads mostly moved within Planet, the advertising agency — the drama's foundation was an office story. But my scenes consisted almost entirely of acquiring shares and meeting executives from client corporations, which gave my material the flavor of a corporate thriller.
At least my Elder Yoon wasn't the loan-shark grandpa dispatching hitmen, so the tonal gap wasn't enormous — but it was still true that I was filming a different genre solo, and it did throw me off.
Was this drama always supposed to unfold this way?
I remembered the viewership ratings, but the actual plot details had grown fuzzy, so I couldn't be certain this was the right track.
From my perspective, it let me showcase a wide range of acting, so I was satisfied — but I still couldn't shake the feeling of is this really right?
And yet, even amid all this, the ratings were holding strong.
Episode 3.4 had actually ticked upward, hitting 14 percent.
Elder Yoon's reception was good too — he'd picked up the nicknames Sweet Grandpa and, alternatively, Badass Grandpa.
Sweet as sugar in front of the protagonist, yet radiating murderous intent toward everyone else like a man carrying a hidden blade — the consensus was that the gap was simply too delicious.
And in the midst of all this, for the first time, I found myself filming not with Ji Seo-eun, but with the other lead actors.