The Weight of a Sageuk
I read the text from Lee Jeonghyeon over and over, then let out yet another sigh.
Noh Bihyeok had told me he didn't care about it at all—only to whine for ages afterward about how I'd secretly prepared behind his back, about how his best friend could possibly fool him so flawlessly.
"I really didn't think I'd get through."
"That's the part that pisses me off even more, you know that? There aren't a lot of people who could actually say that and mean it. Seriously… if it weren't for me, you'd be so lonely."
"Yeah, I know. You're the best."
Since I couldn't be bothered, I gave him a half-hearted answer. Noh Bihyeok snickered, rubbed his nose, then suddenly clamped his hand over it and scrunched up his face.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing, your nose is just so sharp it cut me—hey, Lee Yeonjae. Where do you think you're going!"
Like I needed this kid adding to my stress.
Ignoring Noh Bihyeok as he trailed after me, I slumped face-down onto my desk.
Why did it have to be a sageuk…
The thought alone summoned another sigh. It felt as though I'd spent my entire lifetime's allotment of sighs in just the past few days.
Even I, who knew next to nothing about acting, understood that sageuk acting was on a completely different plane from modern drama. The very speech patterns you had to use were different—and the audition was already next week.
Worse still, since it was a period piece, I couldn't just pick a person around me and copy their mannerisms. The road ahead was pitch black.
First thing I do when I get to the orphanage is dig into sageuk acting.
The one silver lining was that his schedule was free, so Lee Jeonghyeon had offered to give me acting lessons all weekend. The venue: Lee Jeonghyeon's house.
I needed to clear the overnight stay with the director ahead of time, too. There was no way the Misfortune Factor wouldn't migrate after two days glued together, so I'd have to plan my countermeasures as well. The mountain of things to prepare wrung another sigh out of me.
If sighs had taken physical form, I'd have been riding around on a cumulus cloud made entirely of them by now.
***
"Hi, hyung."
"Yeonjae—what happened to your face?"
When I opened the van door and climbed in—the same van that faithfully appeared in front of the orphanage every day—Lee Jeonghyeon, who had been smiling brightly, did a visible double take at the sight of me.
"I haven't been sleeping well lately."
"Why? Don't tell me you're nervous about the audition."
"Of course I'm nervous about the audition."
Come to think of it, Lee Jeonghyeon seemed convinced that I had nerves of steel, that nothing in the world could scare me. I simply didn't show much emotional fluctuation—that didn't mean I was naturally fearless enough to feel zero anxiety about my very first audition.
"I didn't know you were such a worrywart. You acted in front of the camera just fine last time."
"I was an extra back then. What if I mess up and cause trouble for everyone else because I'm no good?"
"However nervous you are, you still have to sleep. If you keep this up now, you won't grow."
"I'm already the second-tallest in my class."
"Oh, right, you are. Yeonjae's tall."
Lee Jeonghyeon grinned, talking to me in that exaggerated adult-to-child tone. For a split second my chest tightened at the sound of it—then I realized I'd actually answered like a little kid, and my face burned.
Somehow, every conversation with Lee Jeonghyeon ended up making me childish.
"Did you practice a lot on your own?"
"As much as I could. But sageuk isn't easy."
"Of course it isn't. Even seasoned actors struggle with sageuk. One senior I know won't even consider it because he doesn't trust himself. Everyone has their own strong suit."
"Did you worry back when you filmed Joseon Romance?"
"Haha, I lost six kilos over that half-year of filming. Draw your own conclusions."
For all that, he'd been incredible.
I pictured Lee Jeonghyeon's performance as the bodyguard from the drama, which I'd rewatched on repeat up until yesterday. That rigid, perpetually hard-set expression unique to bodyguards softened, just a little, every time he spoke to the female lead. And the degree of that softening climbed noticeably as the story moved toward its end. My mouth had actually fallen open watching it. If he'd calculated all of that and performed it deliberately, it was a compulsion worthy of reverence.
And now I had to show my practice to a man capable of that kind of acting.
If I'd been blissfully ignorant, maybe it wouldn't matter—but honestly, the pressure was enormous. Was this what it felt like to be shoved onto a stage without the first clue what you were doing? This strange, hard-to-name guilt only swelled as we drew closer to Lee Jeonghyeon's house, and it finally crested the moment I spat out the lines I'd rehearsed countless times over the past four days.
"Yeonjae."
"Yes."
"Why are you avoiding my eyes?"
He was right. Why did my gaze keep sinking?
I seized my wayward eyes and pinned them on Lee Jeonghyeon. Part of it was that he was wearing a stern, grave expression I'd never seen on him before. When he'd watched my rehearsed performance, a slight frown had formed between his brows—and it showed no intention of leaving. Guess it was pretty bad.
"First, could you explain the character you played?"
"Yes. I played 'Yoo-hyeon,' a crown prince born in the Joseon era. After going into hiding at a commoner's home for some reason, he lives disguised as a peasant and falls in love with the female lead, a nobleman's daughter."
"What was your first impression of the script?"
"Honestly?"
He was still frowning, but he nodded, so I deliberated a moment and spoke slowly.
"My first thought was that it lacked plausibility. It was childish, and there were too many parts that simply didn't make sense."
"Really? Give me an example."
"The part I found hardest to buy was the crown prince's stand-in—the only heir to the throne—being filled by a commoner who'd never received a day of that education. And that the ruse goes undetected for years, on top of that."
"Fair. That's true."
"Yes, and honestly, I don't really understand Yoo-hyeon's way of thinking either. Young or not, a man who lived as crown prince for over twelve years staying absorbed in nothing but his love life while the state descends into chaos… the setup feels clumsy. Also, Madam Lee—"
Once I started, the doubts I'd been nursing throughout my four days of practice came pouring out in a steady stream. When Lee Jeonghyeon saw no sign of me winding down, he looked a little flustered, then soon broke into a smile and listened to the very end.
"Haha, finished?"
"…Yes. I'm sorry. That was a lot of complaining."
"Don't apologize. As an actor, scrutinizing the script that finely is exactly what you're supposed to do. If anything, it's impressive. Even if your part isn't that big, four days isn't enough time to study just your role. The depth of your focus is honestly remarkable."
The writer would be moved too, hearing you. She'd probably call it a scarily thorough critique.
Lee Jeonghyeon smiled warmly, as if his earlier scowl had never existed.
"That's just how Writer Han Jihye's scripts are. Childish, full of things that don't add up. But she's a star writer whose every work explodes. You know Love on the Moon, with Kang Yideun as the lead? That was her debut."
My eyes went wide at the unexpected revelation. It was a title I saw every time I opened a streaming app to watch something, always sitting right there in the 'Top 10 Korean Dramas of All Time' category.
"The script might look silly, but the drama itself will be fine, I guarantee it. PD Kim Minseok is directing, after all. He's been working with Writer Han since Love on the Moon."
"I see. So do they cover the script's silliness with their directing?"
"Not exactly… how do I explain this."
Lee Jeonghyeon hesitated for a moment, then dragged over a whiteboard tucked in the corner.
"You know that making a drama or a movie takes a ton of people besides the actors, right? Can you name some?"
"The director, the writer, the staff… the production company?"
"You even know about production companies? Wow, impressive. Anyway, the on-set crew alone is much bigger. Directors of photography, lighting, and sound, a main writer, sub-writers, assistant directors, and so on… There's honestly no end to the list."
Several circles—looking for all the world like withered scraps of something—were drawn onto the whiteboard.
I lost the thread of the conversation for a moment trying to figure out what they were, but judging from context, they were supposed to be little people.
Right. So he's not much of a drawer.
"The crucial thing is this: for a single work to come into being, all of these people have to combine their strengths. However brilliant any one of them is, it means nothing if the rest can't hold up their end."
"So what matters is how well everyone meshes together."
"Exactly. The fact that both of their works were hits proves that Writer Han's scripts and PD Kim's direction mesh beautifully. They've built a complementary relationship that works."
"Then… does that mean a script like this can really come alive if it's performed by actors who mesh well too?"
"That's it! You truly are a genius actor. You got it in one. In the end, our job is to bring the script to life."
Lee Jeonghyeon wore a satisfied smile as he finally—finally—stopped drawing whatever indecipherable thing that was.
I still had plenty of questions: what meshing well actually meant, how one went about bringing a script to life. But those dying circles were too distracting for any real thought. If I asked, he might just start drawing again.
"Yeonjae."
"Yes."
"To be honest… I didn't submit your paperwork because I really thought you'd get the part."
As if worried I might take offense, Lee Jeonghyeon hurried on.
"Experience is something you can never have too much of. When an audition comes along, you have to try once so you can feel for yourself what you're lacking—and that makes it far more efficient when you actually study acting later."
It was a fair point. I'd been practicing, but even I didn't think I'd get cast. All those days muttering my lines like a corpse on autopilot had less to do with yearning for the role than with not wanting to cause anyone trouble.
I was nodding along meekly in agreement when Lee Jeonghyeon's expression turned strange, and then, just like before, his brow furrowed.
"That's definitely what I thought, and yet… it just hit me that you might actually get in."
"Sorry?"
"Do you know what went through my head watching you act just now?"
Before I could answer, Lee Jeonghyeon sank heavily onto the sofa and laughed. It was a laugh with a faint air of hollow defeat about it.
"I'm so glad there's a big age gap between us."
"…"
"If we were closer in age… wow, I'd be eaten alive by inferiority complexes."
A slightly drained smile sat on his face, yet the look in his eyes as they fixed on me was full of force. It was the gaze of someone beholding an unfamiliar life form they'd never once seen before.
When I couldn't manage a word, he switched back as if nothing had happened, his voice brimming with mischief again.
"Is this something you're born with? Wait—you're not on your second lap of life, are you? I heard that's trendy these days. Now that I think about it, you even talk like an old soul. Don't tell me—"
"How far are you planning to take this?"
The moment the unfamiliar look receded and his familiar playfulness came flooding back, the retort slipped out before I could stop it. In response came a soft laugh and a voice full of warmth.
"Haha, I mean you did that well. You did great, Yeonjae. You really put in the work."
"…"
"You genuinely did nothing but practice for those four days, didn't you? It came through so clearly."
"…Thank you."
At my quiet murmur, Lee Jeonghyeon hoisted me up again and launched into his genius-actor nonsense. This time I dropped all pretense, hiding nothing of my flat, deadpan expression as I asked him to put me down—and that only delighted him more. His tastes really were baffling.
My legs dangled in the air, and my whole body felt like it was drifting weightlessly.
It was a strange feeling.