The Look He Left Behind
"Just as I thought."
When I ran through the lines one more time, Actor Lee Jeonghyeon broke into a satisfied smile.
"Your voice projection is great. Diction, too. Have you practiced before?"
"No."
"Wow, you really were born with it. If you want to act, you absolutely have to excel at projection and enunciation. There's no role where it doesn't matter. Even when you play a mumbling character, it's the same—you need both of those solidly behind you to convey that mumbling clearly. You're already good, but let's keep practicing consistently."
"Yes, I will."
At my answer, Actor Lee Jeonghyeon smiled broadly.
"Honestly, your acting right now is already more than good. I can tell instantly that it's not your usual way of speaking or your usual expressions, and it seems like you've studied what kind of face a person like Yu Hyeon would wear. But…."
Actor Lee Jeonghyeon trailed off.
I nodded to show I was ready to hear it.
"It feels like you're 2% short? This time, it reads less like acting and more like imitation, honestly. My guess is it's because you haven't found any empathy for Yu Hyeon as a person."
"Yes, I think so too."
I had spent the last four days trying to immerse myself in the character of Yu Hyeon, but it hadn't come easily.
Since I couldn't understand why he said the things he said in the first place, every line I delivered felt like nothing more than holding someone else's words in my mouth and letting them sit there.
I was still mulling over what to do about it when Actor Lee Jeonghyeon slipped in a question.
"Yeonjae. You remember the ad-lib from our first shoot? What was going through your head when you did that?"
"At the park?"
"Yeah. Were you thinking, 'Ah, this is something he would say' when you spoke?"
"No. I wasn't… thinking anything at all, really."
That first shoot, when I'd imitated my desk mate Kim Suhan.
Whenever I thought back on it, it felt like a stretch of film had been cut out of the middle. Even trying to recall what I was thinking when I opened my mouth or moved my eyes, I couldn't grasp it—a distant, hollow feeling, like reaching for something that wasn't there.
Back then, I had simply been standing in that spot, without intent or interference of any kind. As Kim Suhan.
Listening to my explanation, Actor Lee Jeonghyeon laughed.
"Right. That day, you were completely immersed in the character. There's no other way an ad-lib could come out that smooth. That wasn't imitation. That was genuine acting."
"……"
"If you want to do the same kind of acting this time, I think empathy with the character is what matters most right now. Acting, at its core, is the interplay between empathy and technique. Your technique is flawless—honestly, it's a little chilling. Brrr."
Actor Lee Jeonghyeon gave a little shudder.
He'd been overhyping me for a while now. He always went on about me being a genius actor, but today it was particularly relentless.
It felt like wearing clothes that didn't fit, so I told him that was enough, and the face in front of me stiffened.
"Yeonjae. I don't lie about acting."
"……"
"I'm telling you, you're genuinely good. The tone and volume of your voice, fine, I could maybe understand that. But how on earth do you use every single one of your facial muscles like a completely different person? Honestly, it doesn't make sense."
"Thank you."
"……Accepting it that smoothly makes me feel kind of weird about it, actually."
What kind of beat was I supposed to hit there?
With nothing to say, I closed my mouth, and Actor Lee Jeonghyeon gathered himself, then gave an embarrassed smile.
"That just now was childish even by my own standards. Sorry."
"It's fine."
"It really is fascinating, though. Same thing just now. From the outside, when you were acting, you were a completely different person. How do you do it? Last time you said you copied a friend exactly, but this time it's a fictional character—there's no one to copy."
"No, I did copy people."
"Huh?"
Looking at him staring at me with rounded eyes, I felt sheepish.
It wasn't exactly the kind of thing you confess to someone who'd just been singing your praises.
"I actually searched around for methods, and… everyone says things like 'draw the character onto a blank white page' or 'fill in the empty space.' But none of that clicked for me."
Still, time wasn't on my side. Only four days remained until the weekend.
I couldn't tell the person who had carved time out of his schedule to come see me that I had no idea what I was doing.
At the very least, within the limits of what I could do, I wanted to give it my all.
"So, first, the one thing Yu Hyeon absolutely can't be separated from is his affection for Nabi… so I based him on a friend who shows something similar, and then borrowed pieces from the people around me, one by one, and attached them."
Yu Hyeon—a crown prince suddenly forced to live as a commoner—could be summed up in one phrase: a selfish person.
He was the one who fled for his life amid the repeated assassination threats, yet he despised the male lead without end—the man whose freedom had been stolen in his place, who shouldered the crushing weight of responsibility for him.
All because of a single reason: the female lead Yu Hyeon loved happened to love the male lead back.
Seeing that, one person came to mind immediately. Oh Seunghyun.
I had known that Oh Seunghyun liked Park Haeun not long after the new semester started. Park Haeun seemed to already know, too.
Truthfully, there probably wasn't a single kid at school who didn't know.
Oh Seunghyun sent those fervent, burning glances at every hour of every day.
Especially whenever I talked with Park Haeun, he would glare holes into us, his eyes looking ready to shoot fire at any moment.
The prickle on the back of my neck I didn't care about, but Park Haeun, who looked like she wanted to die of embarrassment, was a little pitiable.
It was the first time I'd ever seen an affection that made everyone around the person uncomfortable.
It occurred to me that this selfish way of expressing affection resembled Yu Hyeon, so Oh Seunghyun's habitual combative expression and intense stare were the first things I copied.
The childish streak—ignoring whether the nation was in upheaval and trailing after the female lead like a devoted puppy—I borrowed partly from Noh Bihyeok, and the arrogance and bluster that slipped subtly between his lines, a residue of the power he'd wielded as crown prince, I took from Nam Minhee, the girl in our class with the richest family.
Actor Lee Jeonghyeon, who had been staring at me with his mouth hanging open the entire time I spoke, let out a short, ha of a breath.
"You are genuinely not normal…."
"Sorry?"
"Why do you talk about it like it's easy? You're not assembling furniture—how can you just rip pieces off and slap them on like that? Is it really that simple?"
Actor Lee Jeonghyeon pressed me with a faintly disturbed look, but honestly, I was the one who found it absurd.
The man who swapped out his entire self, wholesale, for every project he filmed was saying this to me?
"I don't know if it's innate or not… but your observational skills are remarkable. Your muscle control goes without saying. Then let's make immersion into Yu Hyeon the priority for now. You've built the character's foundation well, so we can layer in the details after you've gotten inside him."
"Okay. But how do I actually go about immersing myself?"
"There are all kinds of ways. One is to seek out experiences similar to what your role goes through. A human being can't understand what they haven't experienced. The important thing is not to leap to shallow guesses."
As the explanation stretched on, Actor Lee Jeonghyeon dragged the whiteboard over again. No.
"If I were the character I'm playing, I'd think this way in this situation, right? You can't approach it by speculating like that and trying to justify the behavior after the fact. You have to become that person and be placed in that situation. Do you follow?"
"A little."
"This method, where an actor completely dissolves into the role and becomes one with it, is called method acting. But I don't think method acting is the be-all and end-all. We always have to be mindful of the camera. What matters, in the end, is the footage the camera captures. What good does it do to be 100% immersed in a character if it doesn't come through on camera? Then it's over."
On the whiteboard, he drew something that was presumably a television.
The shape was so wretched that my pity curdled into something like tenderness.
Unable to focus at all, I dropped my gaze, as if chewing over his words instead.
"So you have to hold the emotional arc while keeping the camera in mind."
"Of course, trusting the camera director matters too. But an actor filming screen work absolutely has to act in a way that reads well on camera. And that's not easy. You could manage being 100% purely sad—but you also have to think, at the same time, about whether that sadness lands convincingly on screen."
"What do you do to focus in those moments, hyung?"
At my question, Actor Lee Jeonghyeon flashed a grin.
"Practice, no question. Acting is a skill, and the proof that it improves with practice is right there. The better you wield your technique, the deeper you yourself can sink into the character—and the more the audience can feel, 'That person really is sad.'"
"That sounds hard."
"Haha, you bet. Acting is hard by nature. Honestly, the more I do it, the harder it feels."
It really was hard. It was like a fistful of tangled thread, knotted solid—I had no idea where to even begin pulling it apart.
As I sank into thought, Actor Lee Jeonghyeon put on the proud face of someone watering a plant that had finally sprouted and slipped in a piece of advice.
"First, Yeonjae—try to grab hold of a single thread that lets you understand the character of Yu Hyeon. That part's up to you."
"Yes. I'll work on it."
"Right. And once you've found that thread, pick out one action that can serve as your button."
"My button?"
"You decide on one action in advance that lets you plunge into the character in an instant. By simply performing that one action, you can draw up the emotions you've already linked to it. That's technique."
Easy for him to say—isn't this really hard? He said it with a sly smile, but there was something in the eyes that came with it.
It was the first time I'd received that particular look, so I couldn't tell what it meant.
That was my visit to Actor Lee Jeonghyeon's house, and several days passed. During that time, I threw myself at practice like a madman.
It was an obsession that verged on blind.
Noh Bihyeok looked at my script—worn pale and falling apart at the seams—shook his head slowly.
"Aigoo, Mr. Lee Yeonjae, I thought you weren't doing acting. Where'd the guy who said he had no plans go?"
"Doesn't that get old? How many days have you been on that joke?"
"Nope. I'll say the same thing five years from now. Kekeke. So, is the role that good?"
Noh Bihyeok snickered, then asked casually, as if it meant nothing.
Even playing the fool, he couldn't hide how curious he really was.
"It's not even the child actor playing the lead—it's a supporting character's younger version, right? Barely any screen time. What's got you suddenly working this hard?"
"It's not that. I don't even expect to get the part in the first place."
"Huh? Then why work so hard?"
Noh Bihyeok asked back in bewilderment, but I was the one with nothing to say.
I didn't understand it myself, either. Why am I working this hard?
It was true that I'd started learning immersion because of the Misfortune Factor, but I wasn't desperate for the drama role.
Even when I wondered if I was lying to myself, whether deep down I really did want to land the part, the truth was I didn't particularly yearn to pass the audition.
When I imagined being rejected, my first thought was a resigned figured as much—I didn't feel sad or hurt at all.
And yet, when I told him I'd been rejected—Actor Lee Jeonghyeon, I mean—
I wanted to be able to say that I'd been rejected after doing everything within my power.
He had never told me to come back only if I'd gotten the part, but for some reason, that look he'd given me at the end wouldn't leave my mind.
I felt bound, tightly, by that look whose meaning I couldn't even pin down.
The night before the audition, only after spitting out my lines countless times, until my whole body was drenched in sweat, did I finally go to bed.
Lying there, staring blankly at the ceiling, a thought drifted up unbidden.
It was absurd. Completely ridiculous. And yet—
'It felt like he was saying: if it were me, I could do it….'
Maybe the meaning in that look had been faith.
That foolish thought came apart, faint and blurred, as consciousness slipped away between the edges of sleep.