Intermission (2)
In the alley where Oh In-soo had stormed off, Yoo Tae-hyuk and Min Joon-young leaned against the wall and sighed.
"Got a cigarette?"
"Nope. Nothing I'd hand over, anyway."
Min Joon-young pretended to rummage through his pockets, flipped him the middle finger, and pulled out his own e-cigarette.
"Carry some real tobacco around for once."
"You're the only one of us who smokes that stuff anyway. So which time is this, exactly?"
"No idea. Doesn't matter — the drummer's fated to come crawling back no matter what."
"His name is Oh In-soo, not 'the drummer.'"
Min Joon-young snapped, irritated. In truth, he'd bailed on Agitato a few times himself, just like Oh In-soo. And every time, he'd had no choice but to come back — because of the devil's talent Yoo Tae-hyuk carried. The man's personality was a dumpster fire, but you'd be hard pressed to find anyone else in the indie scene with that kind of star power and producing ability.
"Go easy on him when he gets back. Finding a drummer is an absolute nightmare."
"If we can't find one, I'll just play it myself."
"You think that's easy? Bass, vocals, and drums? What are you, double-jointed? Got two bodies?"
"Can't we just use a loop station or something?"
"And what's the audience supposed to do while you're fumbling with that? Fine for a one-off event, maybe, but..."
People left the band because of Yoo Tae-hyuk's personality, then came back because they missed the taste of playing beside him. Agitato had careened through one breakup crisis after another, yet somehow it kept rolling along.
"Hey. Yoo Tae-hyuk."
"What."
"I'm quitting the band soon."
"What? Why?"
Min Joon-young was, more or less, the bridge barely holding Yoo Tae-hyuk and Oh In-soo together. Hearing that he was done for good was enough to startle even Tae-hyuk.
"Tae-hyuk. I want to make money."
"You're making money."
"A lot of money. Shouldn't we be moving up to the big leagues by now? We've gotten plenty of calls from media outlets, and you shot down every single one."
"That's..."
"It's not real art, is that it?"
Real art. A jab aimed straight at the creed Yoo Tae-hyuk clung to — and at his past.
"Break that old habit of yours. You're not doing classical anymore. You're in our band."
"...And a band isn't art?"
"Not the way we do it. Dating whatever fan comes along and getting dumped, huh? Tell me — is scraping together a day's pay to eat another day what you call art?"
Yoo Tae-hyuk watched the lines come spitting out of Min Joon-young's mouth.
Any cinephile with a taste for interpretation might even draw a thread from those "old habits" — the way Yoo Tae-hyuk stubbornly kept to tobacco while Min Joon-young puffed on a vaporizer. Everyone else had moved on to e-cigarettes; he alone held out for the real thing.
"Even art needs a healthy bank balance. It's not like the opportunities don't exist... How long are we supposed to live like grubby strays?"
"..."
"Do your parents really not say anything about you living like this? You suddenly announced you were doing a band, and they didn't even try to stop you..."
"Why the hell are my mom and dad coming into this?"
A thread of irritation, subtle but unmistakable, wound into Yoo Tae-hyuk's voice. Yoon Jay had flubbed two takes delivering this exact line.
"Fair enough, pulling the parents card at twenty-nine is pretty pathetic."
"That's what I'm saying."
"Anyway — call me when you've got your head straightened out. I'm off."
Watching Min Joon-young's retreating back with a tangle of emotions in his eyes, Yoo Tae-hyuk picked up the guitar he'd smashed and headed for the musical instrument arcade.
"How many times has it been now?"
"Spare me the commentary. Just fix it, and fast."
"Cash."
"On credit. The gig pay hasn't come in yet."
"Hah... rotten punk. Go practice over there, see if I care."
The old man grumbled and swore, but repaired the instrument all the same. He, too, was one of the many who had fallen for Yoo Tae-hyuk's playing.
"Does a musician never once think about taking care of his own instrument? What if you wreck it like this again?"
"Dunno."
Dodging the old man's nagging, Yoo Tae-hyuk had settled into a corner with his acoustic guitar when the street outside erupted into noise, and he turned his head.
"What's going on over there?"
"What do you think? He's closing up shop."
Across the street, a cheap violin left behind by the shuttering instrument store sat abandoned at the edge of the road.
Yoo Tae-hyuk's gaze wouldn't leave it. He couldn't shake the feeling that the forsaken violin looked exactly like the man he was now.
"Excuse me."
On the way back with his repaired instrument, someone called out to him near the spot where Agitato had performed. It was Jung Yi-hyun, who had been watching from the back.
"D-do you need a band member, by any chance?"
"What?"
"I heard the drummer's leaving..."
"He does that and then comes right back, though?"
"Th-then do you need a member or not?"
The meeting of the two leads was anything but dramatic. Yoo Tae-hyuk let out an empty laugh at the sight of Jung Yi-hyun, who looked as if he were staging the first act of rebellion in his entire life. Normally he would have ignored the kid outright — but Oh In-soo's seat happened to be empty. He bails out of this band like it's a daily meal. A little jolt from a new member might do him good.
"How old are you?"
"Twenty-seven."
"Then I'm your hyung. Follow me."
He had picked up a strange kid.
Even Yoon Jay, gifted in ways no one else was, had one thing he simply couldn't do: smoke. In Intermission, Yoo Tae-hyuk was written as a chain smoker who poured liquor into his gut like a full-blown alcoholic. Honestly — what even counted as an outer cigarette versus a real drag? Yoon Jay stared blankly at the performance of navigating empty air, cigarette and all.
"Hyung, you're looking a lot smoother now?"
"Am I?"
His posture was flawless. He'd modeled himself after the way actors on film drew on a cigarette so deliciously that even non-smokers felt the craving.
"You were coughing your lungs out before."
"Why do people enjoy torturing themselves like this? Spicy food, and now cigarettes..."
Yoon Jay was dead serious, and for some reason that made it so funny Kang Ha-jun had to fight down his laughter.
What Yoon Jay was burning was, of course, a prop cigarette — but even herbal, nicotine-free ones aren't kind to the bronchial tubes. Puffing away at the dry thing, he gave off a faint, subtle scent of rosemary.
"Didn't the director say you didn't have to go this deep on the details?"
"And what about you?"
Yoon Jay looked pointedly at Kang Ha-jun's hands — the ones Ha-jun had admitted to practicing until they blistered. At the audition they'd been perfectly ordinary hands; now they were lumpy and rough with calluses.
"That's... I want to actually play it properly. No hand-sync."
"You don't need to push yourself that hard."
"But you're good at it, hyung."
Kang Ha-jun, a former idol trainee, already had solid basic vocal skills, so he'd focused entirely on the band performance up through the crank-in of Intermission. Thanks to that, some genuinely good footage had come out of it — but the handful of scenes demanding high-difficulty playing still had to be handed off to session doubles. Everyone had praised his preparation, and even that left him unsatisfied. His benchmark was Yoon Jay, who handled every instrument as if he'd spent twenty years with each one.
Sensing exactly where the kid's head was, Yoon Jay bit down on the fake cigarette, then exhaled.
"Ha-jun."
It was true — the director had mentioned that Kang Ha-jun seemed to be running himself ragged lately. On other sets, Yoon Jay had been the maknae: the youngest, the least experienced, the least significant. There had never been a need to offer advice to other actors. But Intermission's set was different.
"We're actors. We're not trying to become professional musicians."
"..."
"It's fine if the performance doesn't come out the way you hear it in your head. That's what directing is for. This movie isn't something you're making alone."
"That's... true."
"You don't need to copy me. Honestly, if you wreck your condition from over-practicing and it hurts the shoot, that's the real disaster."
"Okay."
It was true that Jung Yi-hyun played beautifully — but that was only one piece of who Jung Yi-hyun was. The point was that the character's story within Intermission had to come first, before anything else.
"I don't exactly have the career to be handing out advice, but..."
"No, who cares about years. You're better than I am."
Thankfully, it didn't sound laced with bitterness. Yoon Jay believed a lead actor's role wasn't exercised only in front of the camera. Just as Lee Hyein had freely given him her hard-won wisdom on Daldongne, a lead's presence could shift the entire temperature of a set.
The other actors who had been listening in on the conversation cut in.
"Ha-jun, just think of this hyung as a different species. Easier on your pride."
"Exactly. Us regular folk, we lean on our trusty hand-sync."
They were Baek Do-kyung and Nam Chan-hee — the actors playing Min Joon-young and Oh In-soo. Both were the same age as Kang Ha-jun, which meant that for the first time in his career, Yoon Jay was the eldest brother among his fellow actors. They all shared one more thing: every one of them had debuted last year. Perhaps that was why the three of them warmed to each other so quickly, orbiting around eldest-hyung Yoon Jay.
"The more I think about it, the more I feel like those two got handed the wrong roles."
"Right? Same."
The full script hadn't come out yet, but as written, Jung Yi-hyun was a once-in-a-generation genius while Yoo Tae-hyuk — genius though he was — was one whose talent needed a fair measure of hard work propping it up. Two subtly different textures. Yet judging by the actors themselves, the casting seemed reversed.
"The director must have his own reasons."
Yoon Jay ground the herbal cigarette out against the sole of his shoe and dropped the stub in the trash.
"Hyung, by the way — did you see the article that came out about us?"
"I did. I just hope it doesn't end up hurting the movie over me, for no good reason."
"Oh, come on. How is any of that your fault?"
"Yeah, seriously. Thanks to you, hyung, our names are already getting out there."
The Agitato performance used in the very first scene — no matter how many NDAs had been signed, there was no stopping after-the-fact reviews from leaking to the outside world. And the leak had started at Yoon Jay's fan cafe.
Apparently a fan of Yoon Jay had been mixed in among the paid audience plants. The post was a single sprawling paragraph of honey-dripping praise: our actor plays the instrument himself?! The styling is insane and his skill is insane. And the second I heard one line of his singing, I nearly fainted. If he ever holds a fan meeting I am going, period — on and on, in breathless fashion.
No proof, believe it or not.
Review posts like this one surfaced briefly on a handful of other communities before vanishing. Naturally, though, there were reporters making a living off scraping exactly that kind of content.
In an actor scene mired in a "star drought," Yoon Jay was a breath of fresh air. There were glimpses of a past youth-star trajectory in him, and yet his acting was so good you'd swear he'd gone off somewhere for decades of ascetic training. With the syndrome-level popularity that had exploded last year still going strong, these review posts fed a steady stream of articles.
No audio had been recorded and leaked; the poster had simply fangirled the way people write idol pre-recording reviews. There was barely even a foothold for anyone to raise an objection. The production company judged that this level of publicity could only help, and went ahead and released official stills from the performance alongside a press release.
"How are our actors feeling today?"
"Director."
Shin Ji-won had a violin case slung over his shoulder. Yoon Jay pointed at it.
"Could that be..."
"Yes."
Shin Ji-won set the case down and showed them what was inside.
"Ooh... it's gorgeous. Real vintage."
"Isn't this the kind of instrument that only gets more expensive with age?"
The violin — which would double as a filming prop — was Shin Ji-won's own, its surface worn with the patina of his hands.
"Director, what year was this one made?"
"You can tell just by looking that it's aged, can't you? It wasn't born sometime in the eighteenth century, was it?"
"That's classified. Jay-ssi, you've seen it played, haven't you? Care to give it a try? It's fully tuned."
Seen it played? What's that supposed to mean? Kang Ha-jun spotted the flaw in the director's words — but the dissonance didn't last long. Because the moment Yoon Jay settled into position, an utterly different aura rolled off him.
"Whoa..."
"Wait — is that hyung good at the violin too?"
"Shh."
Before long, a sweet, seductive melody rose from the violin, and the other staff members stopped what they were doing to watch Yoon Jay play.