The Art of the Ninety-Degree Bow
Jo Yooshin had called me out to a secluded corner a little ways off from the set.
The perfect spot to berate a junior away from prying eyes.
And that, of course, meant the reverse was also true — whatever I did here, no one would see a thing.
Which was exactly the case right now.
His manager was waiting a short distance away, but positioned behind Jo Yooshin, with no line of sight on me.
As for the other person... Rion? What was *he* doing over there?
It was a little surprising to find Rion in the area, but he too was far enough away that he couldn't make out whatever was about to happen here.
So I drove a Demonic Cult Punch straight into Jo Yooshin's solar plexus with a clear conscience.
"Goodness, sunbae-nim. Are you all right?"
Here's a fact only those who've been on the receiving end would know — take a sudden hit to the solar plexus, and the shock cuts off your breath entirely.
Normal speech becomes impossible, too.
While Jo Yooshin wheezed and fought to stay conscious, I pretended to steady him, closed in, and hammered the Jianjing and Quchi acupoints hard for a second wave of shock.
His arm probably wouldn't move properly for a good day or so.
"Yooshin? What's going on?"
"Ah, sunbae-nim suddenly... your manager's here, so I'll be heading out."
"You... you..."
"...Understood. Take care."
The moment Jo Yooshin staggered, his manager came sprinting over, and I handed him off and beat a hasty retreat.
Watching Jo Yooshin convulse with what looked like genuine indignation, I felt every ounce of my accumulated stress simply evaporate.
"Good. That should keep things quiet for at least a few days."
A junior actor assaulting a senior looks reckless no matter who's watching, but in this particular situation, it wasn't much of a problem at all.
*The junior's got no manners. Disrespectful little punk. Doesn't know to be scared of his elders* — that's everyday gossip any senior actor can spout about anyone. But *"I got beaten up by a junior"*? That's not something you go around announcing.
Look at Jo Yooshin — a guy whose pride was clearly the size of a mountain. Was he really going to tell anyone about this?
If anything, he'd be the one scrambling to smother the rumor himself.
Whether I acted well or poorly, Jo Yooshin badmouthing me behind my back was a foregone conclusion — but he couldn't even mention that I'd hit him?
Not a shred of evidence, not a single witness, anywhere.
There was literally no reason *not* to do it.
If Jo Yooshin had two brain cells to rub together, he couldn't keep acting up after suffering an indignity like this.
At first he'd be wondering what on earth had just happened, and he'd need time to sort his thoughts out anyway.
And just as I predicted, Jo Yooshin stayed quiet for exactly three days.
But this alone was never going to keep him silent for long.
Kids like him are precisely the type to pour their whole heart into pointless vendettas.
"What, planning to hit me again like last time? Go ahead, try it."
Three days after I'd landed the Demonic Cult Punch on Jo Yooshin.
Sure enough, he summoned me again today.
A day with no shooting for senior Kang Ji-woo.
He'd picked the date deliberately.
Honestly, I'd marked today as D-day myself.
I'd figured a man whose patience was made of tissue paper wouldn't drag things out much longer.
"Haha, I'm afraid I don't know what you mean."
"Wow. What a shameless little bastard..."
To his credit, Jo Yooshin could learn. This time he'd called me somewhere different.
Sparsely populated — but not *empty*.
A exquisitely balanced space, where if I attacked him, someone might just notice.
"Insolent punk. You think I've never dealt with punks like you? Seriously, do you think I'm some pushover just because I'm your senior?"
And there it was — that supremely confident tone of his.
Even after taking a surprise hit, he kept up the bold provocations, which meant he had something hidden up his sleeve.
A voice recorder, for instance.
If I threw a punch or said something careless here, he'd capture it and use it as leverage against me.
Such an obvious play it almost made me yawn.
"Hmm..."
I cast a casual glance around.
The manager had retreated to the back as before, and there was a faint stir of unfamiliar presences nearby.
Don't tell me — reporters?
It didn't feel like Jo Yooshin had called them; more like they were the entertainment reporters permanently camped around our set.
Well, our drama *was* riding high, so it'd be stranger if there *weren't* reporters secretly staking out the filming locations.
In that case, I could afford to be a bit more proactive.
"I'm so sorry, sunbae-nim!"
"...What?"
"I'm so sorry, sunbae-nim!"
To the Jo Yooshin desperately trying to bait me, I hammered out repeated ninety-degree bows.
Naturally, every eye in the vicinity swung our way, and even his flustered manager came rushing over.
"Haha, Baek Si-woo, what's gotten into you all of a sudden? Come on, let's get going, our star."
Jo Yooshin was dragged off by his manager, wearing an expression of pure injustice.
No, seriously.
If you want to chew out a junior, you call them somewhere with *no one around*.
This place was, quite obviously, crawling with eyes.
With a small commotion kicked up and Jo Yooshin hauled away, Rion sauntered over this time, laughing awkwardly.
"I mean, even in gambling dens they retired that kind of ninety-degree bow ages ago..."
"Well, if bowing like this soothes sunbae-nim's feelings, I can do it as much as he likes."
"Strange. Doesn't seem like your sort of personality."
"Oh, come on."
That wrapped up my side of things.
All that was left now was waiting for the tabloids to do their tabloid thing.
A junior actor apologizing at a full ninety degrees to a senior on set.
If the reporters had caught that on camera, what kind of article would they write?
A journalist with any common sense would go with something safe, like 'Popular Star Jo Yooshin in Shocking Clash With Rookie Actor!'
His manager was probably worried about exactly that and evacuated Jo Yooshin at top speed.
Jo Yooshin was still young and didn't seem to grasp how this industry worked, but a manager at an agency the size of SD would know that the more popular a drama gets, the more carefully everyone needs to tread on set.
But I wasn't too concerned.
They'd assume a bit of gossip like that could easily be smoothed over with the company's muscle.
Worst case, some twenty-something actors butting heads, a senior keeping a junior in check — that's such a common occurrence it barely qualifies as a story.
That is, unless Jo Yooshin were known throughout the industry as a saint leading an impeccable life, which he wasn't — he was just an ordinary popular actor, number one in the kind of dirt a tabloid could dig up.
But there was one thing even his manager had momentarily forgotten.
The fact that I was in full seventy-year-old makeup.
Everyone attached to this set, of course, and the viewers of our drama knew that Elder Yoon was really the twenty-something rookie Baek Si-woo.
But the world had far more people with zero interest in this drama than you'd think — and no shortage of people who'd curse out a stranger at the drop of a hat.
Say you knew nothing about the show beforehand, and you saw a photo of me drilling ninety-degree apologies at Jo Yooshin. What would you think?
Feeling a premonition by now?
Good. That means you're normal.
It wouldn't even be speculation to calculate that at least one of the vultures gathered here might find a way to milk this for clicks.
After all, sneaking into a closed filming set in the first place already screams *tabloid scum*.
And the result came to light the very next day.
"...Yep. Now *that's* journalism."
A tabloid being a tabloid, in other words.
The sneakily snapped photo, framed from behind at an exquisite angle, didn't even show my face — which meant it looked, to any observer, like a dignified elderly man with a full head of white hair bowing ninety degrees to Jo Yooshin.
The kind of photo that made absolutely anyone want to curse him out.
From the composition to the wording, truly a first-rate piece of tabloid filth.
"Tabloids really have no bottom, do they."
Needless to say, pandemonium broke out on Jo Yooshin's side.
SD issued a rebuttal statement threatening legal action, and Jo Yooshin himself posted his own account on social media.
The tabloid that had been angling for a quick payday grudgingly pulled the article, and with SD intervening aggressively, things seemed to be dying down.
But as I said before, this country is crawling with people who'll hate on someone for absolutely no reason.
So they turned around and started a second wave of harassment, demanding Jo Yooshin explain *why on earth* Baek Si-woo had been drilling ninety-degree bows at him.
This put Jo Yooshin in an impossible position to explain.
And clearing this up definitively required, whether he liked it or not, my cooperation.
"So let me get this straight — you want me to act all chummy with you in today's interview? As a way of clearing things up?"
"It wouldn't be a bad deal for you, either."
"Oh, would it not? But sunbae-nim, you told me before, didn't you? Don't get ahead of yourself riding on connections. You're also the one who told me to stop leeching off the writer and Kang Ji-woo sunbae-nim. And honestly, you weren't wrong. That's exactly why I gave you that sincere apology. So I'm going to forget about connections and just build up my skills."
"Ha. You really..."
Stunned into silence by my answer, Jo Yooshin sent his manager away for a moment and finally got honest with me.
He'd apparently concluded that dragging this out only hurt himself.
"Look, I'll put this plainly. This hurts you too. I'm the lead of this drama. You think dumping toxic waste on me is going to make this drama run smoothly? The ratings drop, I'm telling you."
"That part, admittedly, is true."
"Right, so let's both be reasonable and—"
"But so what?"
"...Excuse me?"
"I mean, even if this drama flops, what does that have to do with me?"
Faced with my total indifference to the drama's fate, I laid out my position for the bewildered Jo Yooshin in plain terms.
"Think about it. I've already gotten everything I came for. Making a name for myself in the industry — that's my whole goal."
"That's..."
"Look. Even if this drama becomes a hit, people are only going to remember Elder Yoon, right? And that's not even my face. How many people are actually going to remember the name Baek Si-woo?"
"That's... huh. Fair point."
"Exactly. So, this whole mess — you handle it yourself, sunbae-nim."
That's what I said, but the truth was different.
Having taken a role, of course I wanted the show to do well — and thinking of PD Yoo and Writer Min, the higher the ratings the better.
But to a man who thought of nothing but himself, my logic sounded plenty convincing, and he was genuinely flustered.
Young kids really are just kids, I suppose.
Even if the punchline is that this particular "kid" was actually two years older than my current body.
"Well, if sunbae-nim insists, I suppose I can cooperate."
"...Really?"
"Yes. So from now on, let's just focus on filming. Like you said, you're the lead. The higher the ratings, the more you personally stand to gain."
"...Fine. I don't want to deal with a guy like you any longer than I have to."
Good enough.
Rehabilitating Jo Yooshin, or leveraging him — I'd never considered any of that from the start.
I simply wanted to plant the impression that I was a lunatic too exhausting to tangle with.
Now that he'd learned firsthand what a headache I was, he'd steer well clear of me from here on out.
"...So *this* is how it turned out."
"Ah, sunbae-nim."
"Don't tell me that article was your doing too..."
"Oh, come on. No way. The tabloid was just being a tabloid."
"Hmm. Is that so?"
Rion, the other lead joining me for today's joint interview, muttered something along the lines of *'I had a feeling it would be him, but wow, he's even more unhinged than I thought'* and went to sit as far away from me as the room allowed.
I sensed a misunderstanding forming here.
Apparently I'd been filed away in his head as *a man to be avoided at all costs, no matter which of the two leads he's tangled with.*