Main Character Syndrome
Unlike the original script, where I'd had zero contact with the other leads, the revised script required at least a few shoots alongside them. So I'd expected to join filming quickly, but Elder Yoon's standalone storyline turned out to be fairly substantial, and until now I hadn't had the chance to observe the other lead actors at work. Now that his solo scenes were mostly wrapped and the security precautions had loosened considerably, I'd finally been folded into this set.
Honestly, I was a little curious.
I wanted to see for myself what kind of acting the hot-shot actors of my generation actually delivered on set. If it hadn't been for the burden of minimizing my contact with the other actors until my identity came to light, I would have been visiting every other filming location ages ago.
"Teacher Baek... is that really him?"
"Did you hear the rumor? You know..."
"Oh, come on, that's ridiculous."
The moment I joined the set, the crew's reactions turned distinctly odd. Just as PD Yoo intended, the rumor was spreading like wildfire.
I'd anticipated this, so it didn't particularly bother me. The staff didn't quite believe it yet anyway.
No, the real problem with this set was something else entirely.
The two male leads — Jo Yooshin's condition especially — seemed completely off-kilter.
"Mr. Jo Yooshin. Your emotions are too much. Be colder. Manager Seo is a character who breathes ice no matter how much fire burns inside him. The moment the audience senses even a flicker of agitation, the character falls apart."
"...Understood."
Jo Yooshin, who had been acting cagey with Rion right up until the take, grew visibly more agitated the instant he laid eyes on me. Considering that he'd never once deigned to acknowledge my existence as I passed by, I figured he must have gotten his hands on some information of his own.
Well, with a rumor that loud circulating everywhere, there was no way he hadn't heard it.
The fact that he still hadn't come charging at me suggested he was only half-convinced himself.
The problem was that Manager Seo, the character Jo Yooshin played, was a stone-cold, utterly unflappable bastard who never lost his composure under any circumstances. Letting agitation bleed into scenes like this one only dug his own grave.
That was exactly why the take had just been called an NG.
"Jo's still a hothead, huh."
"His pressure's been low lately. And he's still keeping Rion at arm's reach, too."
"Is that what they call celebrity disease?"
"Less celebrity disease and more... lead-actor disease? Honestly, whenever actors whose pecking order is ambiguous end up on the same set, that kind of friction is inevitable. Actors and their fragile egos — it's practically legendary."
"If that's the case, Rion seems pretty mild-mannered by comparison."
"You spend years rolling around the idol grinder, how mild can you be? He's just reading the room. Jo's scoring own goals left and right right now — there's no reason to get tangled up in it."
"So Rion is clearly a cut above, then?"
"Well, more than that... let's just call it a unanimous decision."
Eavesdropping ever so slightly on the staff murmuring in a corner far away, I got a pretty good sense of the atmosphere on this set. Setting my own situation aside, the mood here already seemed less than pleasant.
No wonder they'd coveted Rion's romantic screen time — turns out there had been friction from the very start. Judging by the phrase "lead-actor disease," his ego seemed so overinflated that he carried a compulsion to be the center of attention at all times.
What struck me most was the phrase ambiguous pecking order — and thinking it over, it made a lot of sense. Jo Yooshin had debuted as a child actor. In this industry, when a child actor's career goes dormant and they later re-debut as an adult, they're usually treated as a rookie again — though there's an exception: if they played a lead-level role back in their child actor days, that still counts toward their résumé. It's a messy business, honestly. There's no fixed rule or convention, and everyone applies their own personal standard anyway.
In any case, Jo Yooshin — who had played a fairly significant role as a child actor — was in his second year of acting. Meanwhile, Rion, a fifth-year idol, was in his fourth year of acting. Ji Seo-eun, a fourth-year idol, was in her fifth year of acting.
Nobody dared touch the female idol Ji Seo-eun, youngest of the three but the most seasoned actress among them — but the two male actors, being the same age, each quietly believed himself superior, and apparently their war of nerves had been considerable.
If they'd simply become friends and hit it off, there'd have been no conflict at all, but celebrities as a breed tend to guard their pride in the most pointless places. Like sunbaes in the army who go digging for hazing opportunities just because they can.
Jo Yooshin in particular had an exceptionally bratty personality — he seemed to genuinely live his life believing he was the protagonist — so the power struggle had been unavoidable.
Good grief. These are male actors, not actresses, and they're playing status games.
Actresses are at least pretty to look at, but these two, honestly...
My first impulse was to throw the lot of them into Suradong [a reform-through-labor boot camp for delinquents, run by the Shin Sect]. Then again, in a situation like this, what mattered wasn't so much the feud between the two of them as everyone else's reaction — and of the pair, Rion seemed to have the better reputation. After five long years rolling through the merciless idol grinder, the veteran knew to show maximum courtesy to the staff and his fellow actors.
His view of me was the same. As far as he was concerned, both he and Jo Yooshin had lost screen time to me in equal measure, yet he showed no visible resentment. He'd clearly heard something about me too, and didn't let a single thing show.
A far better reaction than that brat over there, grumbling like I'd personally wronged him the moment our eyes met. Besides, with Rion I could sense a faint, unspoken familiarity — after all, our family's deadweight was technically signed to his company. Granted, our deadweight was destined to wash out at the debut team selection sooner or later, but for now she was still on their roster, so Rion and I weren't complete strangers.
I doubted it would amount to anything, but if trouble ever came up, siding with Rion seemed the smarter play.
"Scene 7-21-1, go!"
"You call that a proposal? Now?"
"Elder, but—"
"What exactly did I put my faith in when I backed your side? Is that what Director Jeong taught you?"
"My father—"
"Enough. I've heard quite enough. You insisted on meeting me in person, and this is what it's for... I'll remember what happened here today."
The scene I shot with Rion today was the one where Deputy Director Jeong — having learned that Elder Yoon was quietly amassing shares — visits on his father Director Jeong's behalf to sound out the old man's intentions. Elder Yoon, who already knows that Deputy Director Jeong is working in league with Yoon Seoeun, drives the man out on the spot to conceal his true purpose.
Setting aside whatever quiet camaraderie I felt toward Rion, I was determined to do the acting properly, so I summoned every ounce of force and roared the lines out with full command.
Watching Rion respond to my bellowing with genuine panic, I found that nickname of his — born acting-dol — rather convincing. His face drained white and his fingertips trembled ever so slightly, all of it performed so convincingly it felt real. The fingertips I couldn't vouch for, but facial acting of that caliber is no easy feat.
Apparently the actors here were of a higher caliber than I'd given them credit for.
"OK. Good."
The instant the PD's sign came down, Rion bolted from the set. He dipped his head in a polite bow while cocking it in curiosity, then vanished at a dead sprint — so he was also only half-convinced, apparently.
But why the hurry?
Watching Rion disappear without so much as a backward glance, I found my head tilting in confusion.
"Huh. That kid..."
As I wrapped up my scenes with Rion and moved to the next set, I spotted Ji Seo-eun spacing out off to one side. She was a lead I already knew well, having acted opposite her several times before, and since she'd gone glassy-eyed like this even during our scenes together, I gathered that this was simply her default state. Same as ever, even while Rion and Jo Yooshin were growling at each other.
Well, "Before Payment Ji Seo-eun" is kind of famous even in the idol world. Her stage presence and acting are both off-the-charts insane, but in daily life she zones out with a blank expression, so her fans took to calling her Before-Payment Seoeun.
The phrase "Before Payment [celebrity]" originally gets used to call out laziness or a failure of self-management — but with Ji Seo-eun, how do I put it. She's so famous for it that it's basically become a meme in its own right.
I passed right by the usual Ji Seo-eun and was heading for the other set when my eyes locked with Jo Yooshin's, who was glaring at me with a sulky scowl to the very end.
Those sour little eyes.
Keep bugging them out like that and even I start to feel something about it. If we're being technical, the reason my role even grew was ultimately his own self-inflicted own-goal. And if someone hates me for no reason, isn't it the duty of the strong to give them a proper reason? Some days, I could feel my Shin-gyo itching to come out.
Koreans really are remarkable.
With not just netizens but reporters swarming in, it took PD Yoo's buried footage exactly one week to be unearthed. Public interest in Elder Yoon was apparently hotter than I'd anticipated. Clicks guaranteed, reporters will do anything — they're reporters, after all. A scoop this size had them working with genuine conviction.
Once they'd secured several pieces of meaningful evidence, the reporters leaned hard on PD Yoo, who admitted the truth as if reluctantly letting it slip. And I, playing the embarrassed party, sat through an interview with a fairly prominent news outlet wearing the most awkward expression I could manage.
"So you're telling me... this gentleman is..."
"Hello. I'm Baek Si-woo, rookie actor."
"Huh. So this is really the man behind Elder Yoon."
"Ah, how do I prove it... Ah — this should do it. *Ahem.* Miss, having a hard time of it?"
"Oh wow, there it is. Wait, even your voice changes when you act?"
"That tone just fits Elder Yoon perfectly. I practiced a bit."
"Practiced? You can't practice your way into—"
My interview went up on the internet as an exclusive that very same day, bundled together with the mountain of tiny clips PD Yoo had prepared — every last one showing the entire cast and crew falling hook, line, and sinker for my Elder Yoon disguise.
And so the bomb PD Yoo had prepared began carpet-bombing the internet.
People even started tuning in specifically to verify whether this really was a seventy-something character played by a man in his twenties — and episode 6 of Genius Copywriter, Yoon Seoeun posted a 18.7% viewership rating.
The name Baek Si-woo began, little by little, to carve itself into the minds of viewers and industry insiders alike.
Even if it hadn't yet left any particularly deep mark.