Sixteen Going on Hollywood
The Los Angeles sky in May was bright and cloudless.
Bathing in the sun pouring down without mercy, I thought quietly to myself.
So that's why everyone wears sunglasses here.
It felt like my eyes might go blind.
And here I thought they just wore them to look cool.
Cool or not, survival clearly came first.
"The sun's really hot today."
"It sure is."
The one mercy was that I didn't mind the heat all that much.
The sweat beading on Jinbae's forehead glittered in the sunlight. I'd just raised a hand to wipe it away when a familiar face came trotting over.
("Hey, Bambi! Good to see you again~!")
("Hi, Mia.")
Mia was a girl with the same golden hair and blue eyes as Lily Sweety. She'd be playing young Lily in the music video, and she was my age.
("I watched Killing Horn yesterday, and wow, you're seriously good. I was blown away!")
("Thanks. I watched your sitcom too.")
("What? Really? Oh my gosh, that's so embarrassing.")
Mia was an actress on Sunny House, an American teen sitcom. I'd watched the show to study her acting, though honestly it hadn't yielded much.
Mostly it was all exaggerated mugging.
By nature of the genre, a laugh track rolled after every one of her character's lines, and the dialogue rhythm kept breaking at the seams. The whole thing was stuffed with artificial staging that practically screamed *this is a character on a show*, so there was no telling how good Mia actually was.
Well, she'll figure it out.
The problem wasn't Mia. It was me.
Can I actually pull this off?
Lily's music video was saturated with American culture I'd never touched. Which meant that I—a kid who'd grown up entirely in Korea—had to act like someone perfectly at home in it.
In the video, I appear as a Korean-American, famous enough that everyone at school knows my name. In other words, I couldn't hide behind any excuse about looking awkward because I was Asian—and more than that, I didn't want to.
They're paying me properly. I'll deliver properly.
Rather than wasting time worrying whether I could do it, I might as well practice once more. Oh well. What can you do? Just be good.
Maybe because I'd binge-watched nearly every teen romance movie I could find, the content on the storyboard didn't feel all that alien, thankfully.
("Oh, Lily's here!")
Unlike my tangled thoughts, Mia looked absolutely beside herself.
("How can one person be that cool? She's literally glowing over there.")
The moment Lily, the video's director, arrived, Mia started bouncing on her toes. Come to think of it, she'd said she was a Lily fan.
("You really love Lily, huh. How long have you been a fan?")
At my offhand question, Mia squinted at me.
("A fan? I'm not just a *fan*. She's my role model, hello?")
Mia raised both hands, crooked her fingers into air quotes, and flexed them twice.
The famous American "finger quotes" gesture.
Wow. She's actually American.
So people really did use that in everyday life.
On the outside I kept a perfectly straight face, but inside I was quietly stunned. Seong Ijun and Han Haram were Americans too, but maybe because I'd never felt any real cultural gap with them, this distance hit me differently.
Then Mia pointed her index finger at Lily's jacket.
("Oh my god, look at that jacket! Where do you think she got it?")
Oh no.
I grabbed Mia's finger and pulled it down before I even knew what I was doing. There was no time to think. My body simply moved on its own.
("...?")
("......oh.")
("What was that? What did you just do?")
Watching her stand there utterly bewildered, it finally clicked.
Right. This is America.
I made an awkward face and fumbled for an excuse.
("Sorry, I got confused for a second. In Korea, pointing your finger at someone older than you is considered rude.")
("Seriously? Why?")
Looking at Mia's eyes shining with pure, innocent curiosity, it struck me all over again.
I really am Korean down to the bone.
How am I supposed to explain this?
I probably shouldn't just say it's something in the blood, right?
I'd gotten comfortable with conversational English by now, but explaining Eastern etiquette culture in English... even calling it difficult felt like an understatement.
Just as I was struggling to pick my words, a savior appeared.
("Bambi! Can you come over here for a sec?!")
Thank goodness.
I shot an OK sign toward Lily, who was waving me over.
("Looks like we're starting soon. Let's talk later!")
("Okay!")
Walking away from Mia's beaming smile, I carefully rearranged my expression.
Ha.
Could I actually shoot this well?
Something feels off. Why am I so uneasy?
An unexplainable, murky sensation brushed past my back.
***
To cut straight to the conclusion: my hunch was right.
The shoot was going down in spectacular flames.
("Cut! Cut!!")
At Lily's shout, every member of the crew froze. Mia and I, both still buried in the scene, were no exception.
(......)
In the studio thick with silence, Lily ripped off her headphones and hurled them aside.
("This is driving me insane. You're doing this on purpose, aren't you?! How many times do I have to say the same thing?!")
Lily's voice cracked through the air like a whip. She must have been furious—her face was mottled red and blue.
And then Mia, the star of the twenty-odd retakes, finally spoke.
("I'm sorry....")
Her voice, wrenched out at last, was thick and sodden with tears.
("I'm really sorry. I was trying... I was trying to do it right.")
She was barely holding back the sobs, her eyes brimming over. And seeing that seemed to douse whatever fire Lily had left; she let out a long, deep sigh.
("......Let's take ten.")
The moment Lily walked out of the studio, the tears Mia had been choking back came flooding out. I watched as the staff scrambled over to her in a rush.
"Actor-nim, are you all right?"
"Yes, I'm fine."
I took the water bottle Jinbae handed me and took a sip. Since I hadn't actually performed, I wasn't even thirsty.
This is a problem.
The shoot was lurching along in a state that could only be described as an utter wreck.
It hadn't started badly at all, to be fair.
The video opens on me, laughing in a school hallway. My face is plastered on a locker beneath the words VOTE HIM—a poster for my run for student council president. The setup: I, candidate for class president, greet the students passing through the hallway with an easy smile.
Mia hides behind the lockers, watching me, until our eyes inevitably meet.
Unlike Mia, who freezes solid, I approach without a moment's hesitation.
'Hi.'
'......Hi.'
'Don't we have a class together? What's your name?'
Mia stammers out, 'Ri—Lily,' and I murmur the name over to myself a few times, as if committing it to memory. Then I flash the smile the script describes as *bright as sunlight*.
'I'll remember that. See you around, Lily.'
'......'
Mia stares blankly at my retreating back. The mellow music swells in.
It was an ordinary conversation. A scene so mundane it could almost be skipped over—and precisely because of that, it was brutally difficult.
Because I had fifteen seconds. Fifteen seconds, no more, to make an entire audience believe one thing: that Lily Sweety—the superstar loved by absolutely everyone—fell in love for the very first time, with someone like me.
I had to make people think, 'Well, yeah. Of course she'd fall for him.'
Someone nobody could help but like. A dazzling, universal first love that no viewer could doubt for a second.
I had to prove it before the song even began, and doing that with a few lines of dialogue and a smile was no small task.
So I studied myself in the mirror, endlessly. I fine-tuned everything—the angle of my smile, the trajectory of my gaze, even the timbre of my voice.
The problem was that we kept getting cut before the conversation could even properly begin.
And the cause of the retakes was Mia.
Mid-conversation, Mia smiled. Habitually. It was the same grin her sitcom character wore constantly.
Of course it was going to ruin the take. Lily, as director, had pointed it out quietly at first.
But by the twentieth identical retake, even Lily had lost her mind. She wanted—more than anyone in the world—for Mia to embody her younger self. This was a song about the era when she herself had shimmered. And Mia kept dragging her sitcom character into the frame. No wonder Lily snapped.
I deliberated for a while, then walked over to Mia. As I approached, the staff clustered around her melted away.
("Here, drink this.")
("Thanks.")
Mia took the drink with a hollow look on her face. I didn't offer any special words. I just sat down quietly beside her, and after a moment she spoke first.
("I guess I'm just... too used to acting the way I do on the sitcom. My character is so far from love, you know? She'd rather yell at the sky alone than talk to anybody.")
The character Mia played on Sunny House was defined by a blank, vacant smile. The spacey, off-kilter way she talked, like she lived in another world entirely; the unpredictable emotional register. She was a genuinely charming character—but she was miles away from an ordinary teenage girl blushing in front of her first love.
("I've been playing her for years now, so she just... pops out of me without me noticing. I don't know what to do either.")
I see.
Honestly, it struck me as unprofessional—but I could understand how it happened. The textbook fix was to shake the character off entirely, but she clearly already knew that. There was no need for me to say it out loud.
("Then what if you played it as your character having someone she likes?")
Mia snorted.
("She doesn't like boys. Boys just tease her every time they see her, call her a freak. And honestly? I'm not into them either.")
Mia scrunched up her face and went on a long tirade about how boys her age were always smelly and gross.
...I'm a boy your age too, you know.
I felt slightly awkward. Oblivious to that, Mia heaved a huge sigh once she'd finished complaining.
("Ugh, but how am I supposed to act like I'm looking at a boy I like?")
("Does it have to be a boy?")
("What?")
Mia whipped her head toward me. I met her bewildered gaze evenly.
("Exactly what I said. It doesn't have to be a boy. It doesn't even have to be a person.")
("What are you talking about?")
("Your character—she has a cat in the show, right?")
I hadn't watched every episode, but I knew her character adored the cat she kept. And not just as a pet—it was the only creature she could talk to comfortably, the only one who felt like company.
("Try acting while thinking of that cat. Build up from the feeling of loving something. I think that'd work.")
Mia's face flickered with uncertainty.
("Am I allowed to do that? The scene's supposed to be about looking at a boy I like, and I'd be thinking about a cat... that's not true, though.")
Not true.
After a brief silence, I tilted my chin toward somewhere behind her.
("See that person over there?")
("Yeah. Isn't that your manager?")
("Right. And he's my family, too.")
Mia slowly tilted her head.
("You two are brothers? Huh, I never would've guessed—you look nothing alike.")
("Not family in that sense. We don't share a single drop of blood.")
Maybe he'd sensed my gaze, because Jinbae glanced over toward us. I looked at his gentle eyes and smiled, quiet and warm.
("But I think of him as my family.")
("......")
("And yet, when you get down to it, he's not *technically* family. So—let's think about this.")
How much do my own thoughts actually matter? Even if I think of Jinbae as family, the day 'Ahn Jinbae' gets written on my family relations certificate will never come. So then, by that logic, my thoughts aren't fact.
Unfortunately, reality works that way. True and false, thought versus a reality that refuses to match. And when the confusion born of all that grows too big to rein in—
there exists a way to erase it, like magic.
("You act. Because for at least the moments you're acting, deciding what's real and what's fake is entirely up to you. What I think is everything—because in my world, whatever I think is the truth.")
("......")
("So if you act while thinking of your cat—even if it's factually true that there's no boy you like—is that actually a problem?")
As long as the audience doesn't feel otherwise, it isn't.
("Make them believe it. That's all.")
I said it lightly, deliberately, like it was nothing.
("You can do it. That's literally our job, after all.")
True and false. Reality and thought. The work of blurring the line between them. The work of shrinking everything you once believed was important down to something trivial. The work of seizing control in the middle of that bewildering world.
It was the only duty an actor had—and the one privilege only an actor could enjoy.
("Whatever you show them becomes real. So? Aren't you excited to find out how much people will believe in you?")
("......")
At my smile-laced words, Mia just stared at me, dazed.