Kill It
It's not my fault.
Today I might actually get a little rest.
That was the single thought shared by every member of the staff the moment Yoon Jay appeared on set. When an actor could act well, the cut came early — which meant extra breaks in between, and the rare luxury of going home on time.
"Chairman Baek. You've arrived?"
"Is the farm running smoothly?"
After watching Yoon Jay's first take, Director Park Hyun-seung said nothing to him and simply adjusted his directorial approach. Instead, he offered a single piece of advice: don't go too hard — save a little strength for the final scene. Yoon Jay had been faithfully following that request ever since.
Ha, the atmosphere is great.
In the scene where he delivered a speech before the crowd, he had looked perfectly sane — but the Baek Jin-ri on the monitor had thickened, grown denser. The director marveled inwardly. Yoon Jay was polite and easygoing, yet somehow faintly distant, and yet his artful, disarming performance as he soothed the cult members was utterly natural. And even while playing the fool like that, his eyes were — strange. Something about them was deeply, quietly wrong.
"Can we make the delivery deadline?"
"I believe we can prepare an even larger quantity."
"Good."
There was something uniquely other about the way Baek Jin-ri walked, surrounded by his followers. Was it because everyone else wore black suits while he alone was dressed in white? Baek Jin-ri waved off a cultist who moved to open the door for him and pushed it open himself. And beyond it spread the interior of the farm.
"Tss, haa······."
Flasks and alcohol lamps — the kind of equipment you'd only expect to find in a school science lab. Farm laborers bent over their work, busily manufacturing something, while the man beside them carefully split open the belly of a teddy bear and packed the finished product inside.
Confirming that the gears he himself had built were turning exactly as designed, Baek Jin-ri drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly.
"This is grace."
With the whites of his eyes just barely showing, his rapturous expression truly looked like a man on drugs.
"Um······ Chairman. Won't you be inspecting the quality?"
"Ah. You must be new here?"
"Excuse me? Ah — yes, sir. That's right."
Baek Jin-ri fixed the newcomer with that signature look of his — the one that said he had gone completely mad.
Here, Yoon Jay controlled his breathing to hold the tension. And the instant he did, the newcomer's breath stopped on its own.
Wh-when does this end?
The bit actor playing the newcomer rolled his eyes away, breaking the stare. Something in his gut insisted he had to. If he kept meeting that gaze, something somewhere inside him would break.
Each second stretched into minutes. Baek Jin-ri exhaled slowly, and the suffocating tension eased. Then he tapped the newcomer's shoulder twice with his index finger.
"What are you so nervous for? It's not as if I'm going to eat you."
That's exactly what it feels like you'll do, though. Only then did the newcomer finally breathe out.
"Things like that drag people into torment."
He ran the farm, a place that dragged others into corruption, while pursuing purity himself. Like the white suit Baek Jin-ri wore — a contradictory creed: let the world defile itself, but he would live clean.
"That's why I don't drink or smoke. We must treasure the blessing He gave us."
Anyone who had watched Baek Jin-ri's eyes across every scene shot so far would swear he looked more like an addict than anyone. The line was designed to make viewers think — so what exactly does that make him?
"Cut! Okay!"
And with that, another scene was done. There was no need to check the monitor. Without hesitation, the director called for the next one.
"Man······ you're good."
"Th-thank you."
At his manager's praise, the bit actor playing the newcomer stole a glance at Yoon Jay.
Didn't they say he's a rookie like me? How is his acting like that?
Swallowing hard had been written in the stage directions. But watching Baek Jin-ri's eyes, his vision had blurred and the action had simply come out of him on its own. The cold sweat — that hadn't been in the script at all. A rookie my own age pulled that level of immersion out of me? That's a thing that can happen?
I think I delivered the lines all right······.
But Yoon Jay himself was not satisfied. Every time he tried to sink into the role, the camera kept intruding on his awareness. And now that he finally faced it, it frightened him — and yet somehow felt less terrifying than he'd expected. He couldn't name that feeling either, and the confusion gnawed at him.
I can't exactly ask for a retake, though.
The shoot was scheduled down to the minute, and with a budget this size, the smallest delay could spiral into losses worth hundreds of millions of won. If a nobody extra with only a few minutes of screen time told a director who'd already called an okay, I'm not happy with my take — could we do it again? he'd be told to quit playing artist and keep his mouth shut.
"Wow. At this rate you're going to set a record. Not a single NG."
"Thank you."
He was so dissatisfied with himself that even the compliments wouldn't land. Yoon Jay bowed his head with a polite smile at the praise from his fellow actors.
They're just cutting a rookie some slack, that's all.
His agency and this production company were connected, so naturally they wanted to stay on his good side. Yoon Jay let the looks slide right off him.
The shoot's almost wrapped.
When Yoon Jay finished his remaining scenes and the final day of filming arrived, Moon Chang-min — the lead of The Garden of Evil, playing Kim Yeon-seok — arrived on set.
As he slipped quietly inside, Baek Jin-ri was swinging a baseball bat like a madman straight out of a period drama.
Whoa. Genuinely insane.
Holding his breath, Moon Chang-min crept up behind the director, his eyes glinting with interest at the Baek Jin-ri on the monitor. Until now he'd only known the name — and at last, he was seeing him for himself.
Line delivery was rock-solid, and the acting was good. I like him.
"Cut! Okay!"
"Man, he's really good."
Director Park Hyun-seung flinched violently at the voice that came from behind him.
"Whoa — hyung. You're here?"
"That's Baek Jin-ri?"
"Yes, sir."
More than I imagined. Way more.
They'd told him the role was a cult leader of a fake religion, so he'd pictured someone well along in years. The unexpectedly handsome face had caught him off guard.
The moment Yoon Jay spotted Moon Chang-min, he hurried over in quick little steps and bowed deeply at the waist.
"It's an honor to meet you, sunbae-nim. I'm Yoon Jay."
"So this is my nemesis, at last. No need to stand so stiff, son."
Moon Chang-min was modest for a man of his influence. There was exactly one thing he couldn't tolerate: a co-star who couldn't act. As long as the acting was good enough not to shatter his immersion, he viewed an actor fondly no matter how rude they were off camera. And his first impression of Yoon Jay was, naturally, excellent.
"You're very good. Did you come up through theater? Which company are you with?"
"Astra Entertainment. I never did theater."
"Oh — now that you mention it, I think I've heard that name. Jay, was it? The kid Seo-won's been obsessed with lately?"
Moon Chang-min was a national treasure of an actor with two ten-million-admissions titles to his name, and a master of his craft to boot. He was also close with Lee Seo-won, famous for his uncanny instinct for picking winning projects.
When I heard that Seo-won had suddenly taken to raising a rookie, I was curious. So this is what he saw.
Worried that too much conversation beforehand might bleed away the scripted twist, the director steered Moon Chang-min elsewhere.
"All right, Chang-min hyung. Give us the space. He needs to get into character."
"Huh? Why?"
"You can chat after we wrap. This is Jay's first project — his warm-up takes a while."
In truth, his warm-up took a while because he was deliberately ignoring the camera. But to everyone watching, it looked like preparation for deep immersion.
"His first project? Seriously?"
From the way he carried himself, the man seemed like a seasoned industry veteran of several years. Moon Chang-min wanted to press further, but held back — he needed his own time to get into character anyway.
So that's him. The boss of Jeonchonggyo.
He'd only watched for a moment, but with presence like that, it made sense. For one thing, the man knew how to use his body, and the glint in his eyes when it showed was truly unhinged.
Hmm······ but a boss who only appears at the very end, and he's a complete rookie?
Still, doubt nagged at Moon Chang-min. The big reveal after every single breadcrumb finally pays off — and it's that rookie? But if his agency was that Lee Seo-won's company······ maybe it was actually possible?
Gah, come on. Just tell me already.
Director Park could feel Moon Chang-min's stare boring into him the whole time. Confused, aren't you? Good. Everything's going exactly to plan.
"Jay."
"Yes, sir."
"Don't let the fact that Chang-min-ssi is standing in front of you shrink you."
The director patted Yoon Jay on the shoulder.
"You can radiate even more than you've been doing, right? Like you're going to kill it dead."
"······I'll try."
Until now, he hadn't even reproduced sixty percent of the terrorist he'd used as reference. Pushing further from here was possible.
But — the camera.
How is this any different from what I saw at the fire department?
Yoon Jay had spent days turning the confusion over in his mind.
When Yoon Jae-hee won Best Actor at Cannes, the family had been at home. Director Lee Young-chang had gone up to accept the award on his behalf, and his father had let out a whoop of joy. His mother had been worried — and yet, still, her son had won an award. She couldn't help feeling good about it.
Ding-dong.
[Hello? Is this the Yoon Jae-hee residence? We'd like to do a short interview······]
But the peace didn't last. People's gazes followed them everywhere, and even his simplest offhand remarks — never spoken with that intention — were twisted into something strange.
[Ah······ honestly, not as good as I expected?]
[And they called him a genius? He's just ordinary.]
The weight of everyone's expectations pressed down on his shoulders.
[Ma'am, surely you're not putting too much on the boy just because he won an award?]
[I'm sorry.]
People disillusioned by the sight of him doing nothing berated him openly, and when that wasn't enough, they turned on his mother, his manager. The image of her biting down hard on her lower lip in silence — it was still vivid.
The family strife that followed. His parents' divorce. His mother, alone in America, struggling. To young Yoon Jae-hee, all of it had felt like his fault. He blamed himself for a long, long time — right up until he returned to Korea.
"Kim Yeon-seok is standing by, yes? All right — let's begin."
Yoon Jay had crossed over to America and lived a life full of twists and turns. He'd endured things worse than the phobias and trauma of his Yoon Jae-hee days. He'd assumed newer, heavier mental burdens had simply buried the old ones — but no. It was just PTSD stacked on top of PTSD. The camera was still terrifying.
Then, after coming to Korea, something changed. Why? He thought it through, and only one answer remained.
[It wasn't your fault. It was all ours.]
All this time, he had blamed himself. But now, he had finally been given the words he needed: it wasn't your fault.
So that's what it was. The moment he heard his father's dying words, Yoon Jay forgave himself. And that was why the camera no longer frightened him.
Look at it.
That isn't an 'eye' anymore.
The instant he understood this, the world around him shifted. The 'eye' he had so deliberately shut out now looked like nothing more than a camera. He'd simply been slow to realize it — the strange, sickening rush he'd felt every time he faced the lens had never been fear or dread at all.
It was euphoria — the catharsis of finally breaking free of his phobia — and the emotion had overwhelmed him so completely that he'd mistaken it for terror.
"······Haha!"
Yoon Jay, who had been waiting blankly for the cue sign, threw his head back toward the ceiling and laughed out loud.
Only now did it feel like he'd truly come home. It was fun. This set — and the fact that he could act again at all.
"Wh-what's wrong with him?"
"Why is he suddenly laughing? Seriously, is that guy actually a cultist or what?"
Every eye turned toward him — including several staff members who had already been half-hypnotized by his acting.
Not yet.
He would pour this feeling straight into Baek Jin-ri. The cue sign dropped, and Yoon Jay fixed his gaze on Kim Yeon-seok.
"Hello there?"
The line itself was ordinary. But mixed with the liberation of finally being able to act properly — and an imitation of the true evil that had once tortured Yoon Jay — the atmosphere that radiated from him was unmistakably, radically different from every take before.
"······."
Moon Chang-min's breath caught in his throat.
The uncanny valley — the theory that a human being feels revulsion precisely when confronted with something that looks almost, but not quite, human.
This is — unholy.
The Baek Jin-ri standing before him was the uncanny valley itself. Moon Chang-min, forgetting to deliver his own line, dropped his head. It was a gaze so deeply unpleasant that he could hardly bear to keep meeting it.
Wait······.
Good lord.
The staff stood frozen, bewildered, waiting only for the director's signal. Shouldn't someone call cut?
"······Let's go again!"
The director shouted it belatedly, wearing an expression of sheer disbelief at himself. Moon Chang-min had just blown a take. A national actor with two ten-million-admission films, the first name on every casting wish list in the industry — and he'd fumbled against a rookie in his debut project.
Whoa. Moon Chang-min lost a staring contest?
I told him to kill it, and he actually killed it. The director blinked slowly.
I need to call Lee Seo-won the moment this shoot wraps. You have no idea what I just witnessed.