The Table Read's True Protagonist
His cheeks were so hollow they looked almost ill, his cheekbones jutting sharp, and the expression on his face was as harsh and set as the deep-cut wrinkles that scored it.
The moment Hong Il-beom appeared, the room went still.
From the cluster of managers, someone shot to his feet and came toward him.
"Good morning, Director! Today—"
"I will not be accepting the proposal you made last time."
Hong Il-beom cut the man off before he could finish.
"Every role was cast through proper auditions and outreach. I will not be changing anyone now—bit parts included."
At that icy refusal, the man's face flushed. He adjusted his glasses and forced a smile.
"Ah, yes—well then, please look after our Su-chan, at least. He did land the part through a proper audition."
Bae Su-chan, who had been fidgeting all morning, ducked his head, his face gone scarlet. So that was his manager.
An awkward, uncomfortable hush settled over the room. I laughed inwardly.
He did that on purpose.
Bae Su-chan's agency had probably been angling to slot one of their own into a bit part. Hong Il-beom had chosen this moment to refuse—and, in doing so, to warn everyone in the room.
He would tolerate no interference in the shoot. None.
"We're the ones who should be asking you to look after us. When Su-chan showed up as Kang Geon-bok, I can't tell you how relieved we were."
Lee Ok-dan soothed Bae Su-chan with a kind word, the man having been embarrassed through no fault of his own.
Those two haven't changed a bit.
This was how the couple set the tone. Lee Ok-dan eased the tension; Hong Il-beom, with that famously exacting air of his, kept everyone on edge. After that, no one had any trouble telling the carrot from the stick.
Not always, though.
I caught Lee Ok-dan's eye as she scanned the actors with a sharp gaze. When I gave her a bashful little smile, she covered her mouth and laughed.
"First, my thanks to everyone who has joined this production."
With Hong Il-beom's blunt greeting, the table read began.
The opening of a film is spent showing who the protagonist is, and what kind of man.
Yangho-gun's first appearance was drawn as a figure tooting on a liquor bottle in the middle of a midnight street.
"Live it up, live it up—live it up while you're young~"
His face and clothes were a wreck of drunken disarray. The tune was a mess, his tongue so loose the words sloshed out of his mouth.
Jo Yong-jin, playing a perfect drunk with a perfectly sober complexion, suddenly blinked. Then, with eyes that had cleared of some of that murk, he asked:
"Who's there. Who comes looking for this kite with a broken string, in the dead of night."
For a flicker of a moment, an unusual sharpness and intelligence seemed to surface—and then nothing happened.
Yangho-gun whipped his head this way and that, scanning the street, then slapped his own forehead.
"There's noooo one! Who'd come looking for this Yang nobody, anyway."
He tipped the bottle of cloudy rice wine and gulped it down, then slumped back into a dead-drunk stagger along the dark streets of Hanyang.
And the one watching him from behind clicked his tongue, suspicion written plainly across his face.
"Pfft—"
People laughed under their breath.
Jo Yong-jin, the shy one, never froze once the acting started. His face, so often locked tight with nerves, had gone slack and sly, and everyone found it delightful.
Even so, he had captured Yangho-gun perfectly: a man drawing a government stipend with every path to advancement blocked, living like a wastrel. Right after being appointed secret royal inspector, he let a slight twist of expression show that he was hiding a significant past.
The director and the writer moved on, satisfied.
Bae Su-chan, tense but throwing himself into the read with real passion, got an unexpected note.
"Su-chan, is there a reason Kang Geon-bok keeps throwing in those 'eish' and 'ait' interjections?"
"Uh… if I play it too straight, it feels like they're just fighting, so I was trying to lighten the mood a little…"
"The discord between Yangho-gun and Kang Geon-bok needs to come through fully in the first half, or the picture of them finding their rhythm later won't land as well. The lighter Yangho-gun seems, the heavier Kang Geon-bok has to be, or the balance is off. Keep that in mind and let's try it again."
"Yes…"
The note from the director deflated him, but Bae Su-chan threw himself back into the performance.
The pairing of Yangho-gun, ambling unhurried toward the troubled region of Goseong in Gangwon Province, and Kang Geon-bok, hounding him to hurry up, had a strangely funny edge. Hong Il-beom jotted a note that if Bae Su-chan's take on the character were sharpened just a little more, the scenes would be a delight.
Arriving in Goseong County, Yangho-gun and Kang Geon-bok disguised themselves as woodcutters and slipped into a village—a village that held an impossibly enormous Dangsan Tree.
Behind that tree stood a child.
Hong Il-beom and Lee Ok-dan looked at Lee Su-a with shining eyes.
Lee Su-a was already looking at Jo Yong-jin and Bae Su-chan with Cheon-young's face.
At the head of the table sat Director Hong Il-beom and screenwriter Lee Ok-dan, with the lead actors flanking them on either side.
It was a seating arrangement the couple insisted on, the better to watch every actor's work up close. The closer you sat, the more important the role—and Lee Su-a's place was next in line after Jo Yong-jin and Bae Su-chan.
Everyone who understood what that seating meant turned toward Lee Su-a with a mix of feelings in their eyes. Expectation, wariness, distrust, suspicion. She wasn't even a lead, and still she drew as much attention as one.
Lee Su-a, as if she didn't feel those stares at all, kept smiling at Jo Yong-jin and Bae Su-chan's performances. There wasn't a trace of nerves on her.
Tsk.
Bae Su-chan's manager, Kim Jae-seok, clicked his tongue inwardly.
His actor had finally landed a part in a famous director's film, and he wasn't making anything of the chance. He was getting shown up by a girl who hadn't even been debuted a year.
What the hell is with that kid? She looks like the most relaxed person in the room.
Kim Jae-seok kept glancing at Lee Su-a, and a sense of wrongness crept in.
Why do I keep looking at her?
Bae Su-chan had taken a note, yes, but Jo Yong-jin's acting was rock-solid, and the table read as a whole was going smoothly. The early story belonged to the two of them, and everyone else's eyes had followed.
And yet he could see others doing the same thing he was—glancing, now and then, at Lee Su-a.
The reason revealed itself slowly.
Her face…
The closer Yangho-gun and Kang Geon-bok came to the village in question, the more expression drained from Lee Su-a's face. The round, always-smiling line of her eyes went slack, and the edges turned sharp. The lips that looked made for nothing but a sweet little laugh pressed shut. The shoulders that had risen and fallen, faintly, with her breath went utterly still, and a gaze without a scrap of warmth locked onto Yangho-gun.
The person sitting there was no longer Lee Su-a.
Yangho-gun found Cheon-young watching him from behind the Dangsan Tree.
"Uh, hey…"
"You've come from Hanyang?"
Pitch-black eyes raked over Yangho-gun in a flash. Before the startled Yangho-gun could get a word out under that somehow chilling look, a dry, rasping voice cut through the air.
Cheon-young had faced Yangho-gun for no more than an instant, and that had been enough. Enough to see through who he was.
Leaving the frozen Yangho-gun and Kang Geon-bok behind her, Cheon-young turned. And waited…
"…Director?"
When the moment to cut came and went with no one speaking, Lee Su-a called to Hong Il-beom.
Cheon-young was no longer in that seat.
"Cut…"
Hong Il-beom said it as if they were actually shooting.
Lee Su-a grinned.
"Great work, everyone!"
The long, long table read was over. Every actor, Jo Yong-jin and Bae Su-chan included, had given it everything they had—and still a faintly chilly current ran through the room.
"Wow, that kid is… she's the real thing."
"The role is a fake shaman, and she acted like she was actually possessed."
"The genre's supposed to be a comic mystery, right? So why does it feel like a horror movie the second Cheon-young shows up?"
The supporting actors shook their heads and filed out of the reading room first. Someone even rubbed their arms, for no particular reason.
Director Hong Il-beom, who had asked the leads to stay behind, had a great deal on his mind. The table read had left him with a lot of homework.
"Yong-jin."
"Yes."
"You can't let Cheon-young overwhelm you. I need a Yangho-gun with more steel in him."
"Understood."
The request was somewhat vague, but Jo Yong-jin understood it perfectly.
Every time Jo Yong-jin's Yangho-gun faced Cheon-young, he lost the ease and the sharpness that were the core of the character. If they shot it like this and released it, people might well take Cheon-young for the protagonist.
The protagonist of the film was Yangho-gun. The protagonist of this table read had been Cheon-young.