Daldongne (5)
“Jay, are you all right now?”
“Yes. I'm sorry.”
“Don't be. It happens when you get lost in the work.”
Lee Hyein, the actress playing Kang Subin, gave Yoon Jay's shoulder a gentle pat. Having debuted at sixteen, she was a veteran of thirty-four years, an actress of such renown that it would be no exaggeration to say the drama had been greenlit precisely because she'd agreed to play Kang Subin.
“Sunbae-nim, may I ask you something?”
“Go ahead.”
Lee Hyein was more than happy to listen to a junior who was both handsome and talented.
“Has a memory ever surfaced mid-performance and broken your immersion?”
“What kind of memory, exactly?”
“When the scene in the script eerily mirrors something from my own past.”
Lee Hyein considered the question for a long moment before nodding. She was an educator who gave guest lectures at universities, after all — a true grande dame of the industry.
Han Dayeon had sidled up next to Yoon Jay, eager to eavesdrop on Lee Hyein's golden advice. And once it became clear that neither Lee Hyein nor Yoon Jay minded the company, the other actors drifted over as well.
“Oh, it happened. There was a scene where my character's mother passes away — and it fell right around the forty-ninth-day memorial for my own mother.”
“Ah······.”
“There's no need to look so sorry for me. It's all in the past now.”
“Didn't it make you sad? I mean — not as the character, but to the point where you started showing through?”
“That's right, it did. The director brought it up afterward, too. I think I rang up about three NGs that day?”
Lee Hyein had caught on to why Yoon Jay was asking these questions.
She had no way of knowing — the internet knew nothing of it — that he had been a member of the 115 disaster response team. But she did remember how the director and staff had praised him, saying that of course a former firefighter would have such stamina.
She reasoned that watching Choi Ahra — someone closer to death than anyone else around him — in a state of emergency must have churned up a violent torrent of emotion.
“But later on, I learned to use it.”
Right. I used my fear of the camera to play Baek Jin-ri. But now... I'm not so sure. The mask I've worked so hard to keep on — I don't know when it might crack. Yoon Jay's expression turned unreadable.
“I won an acting grand prize the year I filmed that drama. They said it was because of that scene. So true to life that it moved the viewers on the other side of the screen to tears.”
At those words, the people nearby nodded along, offering knowing murmurs of oh, that one?
“What we do, in a way, is hide ourselves and bring out the character in the script. Like putting on a mask.”
“Ah.”
“But does it really have to be hidden away completely? If you blend the two in the right measure — wouldn't that be method acting? Wouldn't that be what makes a performance feel real?”
Lee Hyein was careful to add that she certainly wasn't claiming her way was the answer — that it could, if anything, take a heavier toll on the mind. But if no matter how hard you looked away, the memory kept coming back anyway—
“Then just... let yourself go with the flow. Kim Sanghyeon's flow, and your own. If the emotion runs over the top, we shoot it again. If not, we fix it in editing. That's what directing is for.”
“Thank you.”
He drew a long, deep breath. I have to try, at least once. I can't hold up the shoot because of me. At last, he nodded toward the director, who was watching him with a careful eye.
Let it flow, huh.
Filming resumed, and he was carrying Han Dayeon on his back again, running.
“Please······!”
He became Kim Sanghyeon, running and running to save Choi Ahra. The man who had wheezed and labored his way up the shantytown hill in the earlier takes was gone.
The pity he'd once felt toward the people of the daldongne — a pity tinged with condescension — was now being worked into his very body.
“Hah... hah!”
Just like before, the world around him shifted. The narrow alley, the school hallway, the battlefield. Then who is the person on my back?
Ben? No. Ben's already dead.
He died last year······ It's time I accepted that. Ben is gone, and clinging to some hypothetical past only hurts me.
Then who am I carrying right now? Choi Ahra. Yes. She comes first. I have to save her.
And those faint shifts in his expression fit the scene all the better for it. The confusion of not knowing whom he was carrying on his back read as the terror that Choi Ahra might die.
Don't die.
A phantom sensation crept over him — that the warmth of Choi Ahra on his back was going cold. Every memory of what Kim Sanghyeon had lived through in Euiseon City flashed past like a dying man's life reel. And at the very end of all those memories stood Choi Ahra.
When he finally made it down the hill, Kang Subin — who had gone ahead — came driving up in the car.
“Hey! Over here!”
They scrambled into the car, and the director's okay sign sounded. As Yoon Jay stepped out and walked silently toward the next location, Han Dayeon tried to call out to him.
“Wow······.”
“Dayeon. Shh.”
“Yes?”
“······Let's not disturb him.”
Something about Yoon Jay's state was far from ordinary. Lee Hyein recognized the feeling — she'd sensed it before, too. The staff quietly cleared the area around him so as not to break his immersion.
Then the scene shifted to a university hospital emergency room. Kim Sanghyeon, pacing restlessly outside the operating theater, and Kang Subin, waiting calmly in a chair.
“H-how is she?”
“She's been moved to the ICU for observation, but she's past the critical stage.”
“Haah······.”
Kim Sanghyeon crumpled to the floor. It wasn't acting — his legs had genuinely given out. Kang Subin steadied him by the shoulders.
“You all right?”
“······Yes.”
Kim Sanghyeon looked up at Kang Subin, laughing through his tears. Relief washing away the doubt of was I too late? — and gratitude, and love, for Choi Ahra, who had held on to the very end.
What kind of acting is this······.
Drowning in a flood of tangled emotion, Lee Hyein fought to keep her own character from collapsing. The camera on his face felt the same; so did the director, watching through the monitor.
“Director. Director.”
“Ah······ Cut! Beautiful!”
The director, belatedly calling the cut, shot to his feet. This one was a masterpiece scene even without a replay.
“Wow······.”
“That was incredible.”
While a few of them lingered in the afterglow, Yoon Jay was still sitting on the floor, motionless.
“Mr. Jay?”
“Jay.”
“Ah — yes!”
They called to him, worry creeping into their voices, and Yoon Jay sprang up and wiped his eyes.
That sensation came back to me.
The one he'd felt in the final stretch of filming The Child. The moment when he became Park Donghwa completely — for a brief instant, he had felt it again.
And there was something more he'd gained, too. He hadn't been able to save Benjamin — but he had saved Choi Ahra.
He told me it isn't good to keep everything pressed down inside.
It didn't matter that Choi Ahra was a fictional person. By saving her, he had been able to lift a little of Benjamin's weight off his own shoulders.
Now I understand why this work pulled at me so strongly. Through this drama, I've finally been able to let go of my own private pain.
That day's footage aired. Lee Young-chang, a man who would normally stop whatever he was doing when Yoon Jay appeared on screen, sat in front of the television — and in that scene, he felt that faint sense of something amiss again.
“Hm?”
The NG takes had been edited together cleanly. But in the moment Yoon Jay's mask cracked, Lee Young-chang could feel it — the actor himself flashing through for an instant, then vanishing again.
Then came the scene of him checking on Choi Ahra's condition and breaking down, and at the subtle shifts of his expression and emotion, Lee Young-chang's eyes lit up like a child's.
“That······.”
He had seen it — the way Yoon Jay had been during The Child. Only for a heartbeat. But Lee Young-chang was suddenly, overwhelmingly moved.
As he turned over memories of his muse of years past, the viewers were feeling something else entirely.
Am I just in a bad mood or something? I can't explain it
These reactions were picked up by the news almost immediately.
Lee Young-chang skimmed the articles, then ducked over to MyTube. He'd heard that behind-the-scenes footage from filming sets got posted there often these days.
So he checked on the off chance — and sure enough, the clip had gone up almost as soon as the broadcast ended. Since no one had been wearing a dedicated mic, he couldn't make out exactly what Lee Hyein and Yoon Jay were saying.
Gazing at Yoon Jay on the screen, Lee Young-chang thought back to the man as he usually was.
He had spoken plainly of the wounds of his childhood, then flipped it around to reassure him, saying he was fine now.
But a wound that had not yet healed had shown through, just now. So there was something more, in all those hours I couldn't see.
Which meant······ everything he'd observed of Yoon Jay until today had been a pane of glass laid over something, and that expression that had surfaced for just an instant—
That must be who you really are.
He deleted, without a shred of regret, the scenario for the project he'd been grinding away at. The script he was writing for Yoon Jay — he could finally see the shape of it.
In the car heading to the wrap party, Yoon Jay belatedly searched for reactions to Daldongne.
Honestly, always portraying poor people as saints is cringe
Isn't that way too predictable?
What's Choi Ahra's deal, acting all high and mighty like that?
Nice premise and all, but taxes still have to get paid, no?
Look at this — no money, no kids, and boom, you die alone like that lol
Some of it was, admittedly, manufactured nitpicking aimed at reining in Yoon Jay, who was on the rise these days — but the opinions ran a genuinely wide gamut.
If The Child came out today, it would've been hard to dodge one controversy or another. Park Donghwa is a man with cerebral palsy, so the chatter would have been even worse. Yoon Jay shook his head.
But there was plenty of praise, too — mostly on the grounds that it was slow-going but honest about its humanism. The serial murder case ratcheting up the drama's tension had helped as well.
Screenwriter Woo Taeyoon had said this at the script reading:
Daldongne had begun with a single post he'd seen online. The one about how if you're poor you're the problem, and if you're rich you're somehow the good guy.
Character and decency don't discriminate between rich and poor — that's a matter of each individual. And the wealth gap is a societal problem. So why did these people insist on wearing tinted glasses and tearing each other down?
“And then Mr. Jay happened to show up on TV. You know that scene at the end — the confrontation with the King?”
“The line about how when rewards differ by the gap, people split apart?”
“That's the one.”
The moment he saw it, he said, he knew he had to cast Yoon Jay. But then the man had suddenly vanished, and he'd been half ready to give up.
“So how do you feel now, Writer-nim?”
“Hm······.”
As a rookie, Woo Taeyoon had gone through endless dilemmas while writing Daldongne. Do I have the right to portray these people this way? What if people call it forced and cheap?
But now, with the finale behind them, his thoughts had changed considerably.
He could never make everyone happy. But······ Woo Taeyoon held his phone screen out to Yoon Jay.
“I'd say this alone makes it worth it, don't you?”
“I'd say so.”
“What about you, Mr. Jay?”
Amid his frantic writing schedule, Woo Taeyoon had been there on set to watch Yoon Jay run down the hill with Choi Ahra on his back. No one had said anything out loud, but everyone had known that something about him in that moment was different.
“······I loved every second of it.”
Yoon Jay's face, lighter by more than one burden, was bright.