Why Did My Screen Time Grow?
"You want to expand little Yoon-ha's part?"
Jo Yu-na set down the mug she was holding.
She'd assumed it would be about the script the moment Director Seol Kyung-woo said he was coming over unannounced.
What she'd expected, though, were the usual kinds of requests—cutting a hard-to-shoot scene, changing a location, something along those lines.
A request to increase a child actor's screen time was a little unexpected.
"So you did find someone for the role."
"Yes. We ran the test today."
"You liked her that much, huh?"
Rather than answer, Seol Kyung-woo pulled out his laptop.
Watching him, Jo Yu-na leaned back in her chair.
It wasn't rare for a director to get attached to an actor. She could understand wanting to hand a skilled performer more scenes the moment you saw them work.
But from a writer's standpoint, it was a different matter entirely.
Every minute added to Yoon-ha's childhood pushed the story of the grown protagonists that much further back.
The first episode especially was already packed to bursting with introductions and the inciting incident alone.
"Let me say this up front—I have no intention of dragging out the childhood arc. We show Yoon-ha's ability and jump straight to the present."
"I agree with that too."
"And yet you're asking me to expand her part……"
"Just watch the footage first. It's not long."
Seol Kyung-woo turned the laptop toward her.
On the screen sat a little girl on a chair.
Her face was small, and set in it were unusual green eyes—strikingly rare in a Korean child, and impossible not to notice.
She photographs well, at least.
She matched the little Yoon-ha Jo Yu-na had imagined surprisingly closely. There was an air of mystery about her, yet the way she idly kicked her feet was unmistakably that of a small child.
A voice outside the frame announced that the take would begin walking in from off-camera.
A moment later, Ji Hak-young entered the shot.
Jo Yu-na was a little surprised that the actor had come out to do the opposite role himself. She opened her mouth to ask about it—and then stopped.
Because the girl's gaze had changed.
The eyes that had been glancing indifferently around the room froze on one spot.
The swinging feet went still. Her chin lifted slightly, and the small fingers braced on the seat of the chair tightened.
Jo Yu-na withdrew the hand that had been reaching for her mug.
There was no shard of the future in that frame, no grown-up Do-jin standing in the rain. And yet the girl was clearly looking at something.
Jo Yu-na found herself recalling the stage directions she had written.
Do-jin as an adult. Nakhwadang. A funeral, and burning documents.
Where each of those scenes would eventually land surfaced naturally, one after another, following the child's face.
At last the girl's gaze came back down.
It was the look of someone re-examining the person she had just been staring at.
Sorrow still lingered in the corners of her eyes—and a small smile had risen to her lips.
"You came."
The footage ended.
Jo Yu-na stared at the screen for a moment, then grabbed the mouse. She scrubbed the playback forward and watched the final stretch once more.
This time it started from the face just before the smile.
"What did you tell her to do here?"
Seol Kyung-woo answered as if he'd been waiting for the question.
"I didn't direct any specific emotion. I just checked she'd read the script and rolled."
"Has she… trained, though? Which agency?"
"No. Apparently this is her first time. She's the daughter of a friend of Ji Hak-young's—he recommended her, said she had the right look for the role, so we took a look."
Jo Yu-na watched the footage again.
Frankly, it was a little hard to believe.
Memorizing lines and hitting a rehearsed expression—those could be taught to any child. But that smile didn't look like something manufactured.
Everything she'd seen moments before was still alive inside her. The emotion didn't vanish once her gaze came down; as she confirmed the boy standing in front of her, it shifted, bit by bit, into something else.
Which was exactly why the greeting she gave a total stranger didn't ring strange at all.
Jo Yu-na spread the script on the desk.
The sentence she had written was short.
Little Yoon-ha gazes at Do-jin and gives a faint smile.
What she'd been thinking about when she wrote it went far beyond that.
The certainty that this stranger would come back to this place many, many years from now. The vague sense that something bad would happen to him along the way. And even the disquieting knowledge that she herself was tangled in that future.
But she couldn't ask a six-year-old to convey all of that on camera.
So her plan had been to compensate in the editing—with a little explanation left in the adult Yoon-ha's dialogue.
And yet the girl on the screen had been showing that emotion before any explanation even began.
"I asked her why she smiled at the end."
"What did she say?"
"She said he looked like he was having a hard time at first, but when she looked again he was standing just fine—so she was glad."
Jo Yu-na laughed softly.
It was a very young child's explanation.
Yoon-ha doesn't know what will happen to Do-jin. To a child that age, the very concept of the future wouldn't be clear yet.
But once she had seen the boy in front of her, there was no way she could treat him exactly as she had before she looked.
Because of something that hadn't even happened yet, her heart had already moved.
Jo Yu-na gazed at the girl's face on the screen for a long while.
"What's her name?"
"Jegal Yeon."
"Yeon……"
Even the surname was striking. Jegal—surely one of the rarest family names in all of Korea?
As she murmured the name to herself, she turned a few pages of the script. Seol Kyung-woo waited without hurry.
Her hand stopped on the pages holding the adult Yoon-ha's dialogue.
"What you're proposing is moving this explanation earlier, right?"
"Yes. Not all of it—just a little more of what happened when they first met."
Seol Kyung-woo drew his chair closer.
"Right now, the reason Yoon-ha is wary of Do-jin gets explained later, in dialogue. But if there's even one small scene in the childhood arc, viewers will see the two of them differently from the moment they reunite."
"A meeting that meant nothing to Do-jin—and everything to Yoon-ha."
"Exactly. And I think that girl can show us that difference."
Jo Yu-na picked up her pen.
It wasn't as though nothing had happened in the children's past. In the process of tightening the story, she had pushed things off-screen—scenes cut when she was pruning the fat, because proper pacing was sacred.
While the adults were talking inside the house, where were the two children? What had Yoon-ha asked Do-jin? And what did Do-jin make of the girl who couldn't stop looking at him?
As she pictured the face from the footage, the conversation began to string itself together.
"Do-jin won't like it."
"Nakhwadang?"
"The staring. A strange little girl keeps looking at him, so of course he won't."
Jo Yu-na jotted a short line in the script's margin.
A boy who asks why she keeps staring. A Yoon-ha searching for her answer. A child who saw everything vividly and yet had no words to explain it.
"What if Yoon-ha says she saw Do-jin for a really long time? Everyone else only flashes by for a moment, but oppa stays visible for ages."
"I like it. And Do-jin doesn't understand a word of it."
"Right. And Yoon-ha can't explain further either. All she knows is that she saw something strange."
The director nodded. Jo Yu-na didn't stop writing.
The parting scene connected naturally, too.
Do-jin says he doesn't want to come back. He doesn't like the soaked courtyard, or the way the adults talk over his head.
And at those words, Yoon-ha's face goes strange.
Because she definitely saw him coming back.
"Here it's fine if she just seems like an ordinary kid. He tells her he's not coming, so she wonders if she saw wrong and looks at his face again."
Jo Yu-na erased the sentence she'd been writing and started fresh.
Yoon-ha was no sage who knew the future. She was a child who got confused when what she'd seen didn't match what she'd heard. If Do-jin got upset, she might flounder, unable to figure out what she'd done wrong.
Layered against that earlier stillness, reactions like those would only sharpen her into a clearer, more vivid character.
"We'll fit this scene into episode one……"
She pulled another sheet of paper toward her.
"And let's shoot one more after Do-jin leaves. Save it for a flashback later."
An adult of Nakhwadang asks Yoon-ha what she saw. The girl says it rained, and that the boy had grown very, very tall.
And then she adds one last thing.
That standing beside him—she thought maybe she had been standing there too.
Seol Kyung-woo looked down at the words on the page.
That single short line was enough to explain why the adult Yoon-ha could never easily let Do-jin close. She had already known that she was tangled in his future.
"So we just keep this hidden until the reveal point you have in mind."
"Yes. Until then, all we show is that Yoon-ha finds Do-jin strange."
Jo Yu-na marked the later pages of the script.
It was the work of carving out existing explanation to make room for the new scenes.
For a while, only the rustle of turning pages filled the room.
Seol Kyung-woo glanced at her empty mug. Judging by how the writer kept writing without so much as a sip of tea, he figured the purpose of today's visit had been thoroughly achieved.
"I'll send over the acting footage."
"Please do—and don't trim anything before or after. Send it all."
Jo Yu-na answered while writing a fresh line, and Seol Kyung-woo smiled.
"Sounds like you're pleased."
"Of course. That girl is a genuinely rare—"
Genuine genius.
Jo Yu-na swallowed the rest of the sentence.
For several days after the audition, Father was in a good mood. He'd always been quick to laugh, but lately he'd taken to chuckling to himself whenever he looked at me.
Mother, meanwhile, was a little wistful that she hadn't come along that day.
"I wanted to see it too."
"Mm, you'll get to watch it on TV later, won't you?"
The result was a foregone conclusion. When a director showed that kind of attitude, anything other than a pass would have been the bigger surprise.
Me, I was just a bit embarrassed. I'd spoken exactly one line, and both my parents had been talking about it practically every day since.
Father even recited Ji Hak-young's compliment nearly word for word.
'He said she might have more talent than I do?'
That, I suspected, was a friend-of-a-friend exaggeration. I'd been able to play Yoon-ha's short scene because I'd lived it firsthand. Whether I could do the same for any other role was another question entirely—especially since I didn't even know what triggered the ability in the first place.
Still, hearing that I'd done well felt good.
In my past life, I'd come home from auditions and check my phone before anything else. Knowing full well the odds of a call were slim, I'd turn the screen on anyway.
This time, before I even had the chance, Father brought me the news himself.
"Yeon, honey—you passed the audition! And a new script came too!"
I lifted my head from the sofa.
"Did my lines change?"
"They got longer. The writer watched your footage and wrote extra scenes for you."
My eyes went wide.
A writer rewriting the script after seeing an actor's audition was not the kind of thing that happened every day. Was my acting that day really that good?
I sat up and hurried to grab the tablet. Opening the freshly sent file, I found the familiar scene—Yoon-ha sitting on the wooden floor, Do-jin coming through the gate, and the single line spoken after glimpsing shards of the future.
So far, identical. The problem was what came next.
I turned the page, and my character was still there. I turned another, and she was still there.
"……Dad."
"Yeah?"
"You said it was one line."
"It grew because you did so well. That's a good thing."
Yeah, but this makes the job way bigger.
I was even starting to wonder whether this could still be called a bit part at all.
I traced the new lines with my finger as I read. This time, there was an opposite role—a character to act against. Sitting alone and dropping one line was one thing; having actual dialogue across multiple scenes was another beast entirely.
Which brought the predictable problem: time.
"So shooting won't wrap in a single day."
"They'll send over a new schedule. We'll go over it together with your mom and decide. Tell us if it feels like too much."
Mother, folding laundry beside us, nodded along.
"You've got kindergarten too, so too much will wear you out. You only just got better, Yeon."
I gave a vague answer of agreement, my eyes already sliding to the next page.
"The writer says she'd like to meet you in person."
Father added this from beside me. I looked up from the screen.
"Me?"
"Yep. The director said she's watched your footage over and over—sounds like she really likes you."
Jo Yu-na.
Right now she was a cable writer turning out modestly successful series. In the future, she'd be the star writer behind mega-hits. Becoming close to her at this stage would be an opportunity beyond price.
'Hold on—why am I already thinking like I'm definitely becoming an actor?'
Still, there was something surreal about it: because of my acting, my own part had grown. In my past life, footage I'd shot getting trimmed in the edit was routine. Sometimes, in the finished product, my face barely appeared at all. That was just what an interchangeable, vaguely handsome male actor was.
This time it was the exact opposite. Someone had watched my performance—and the writer had added dialogue that had never existed, dialogue written by the woman who would one day be a superstar of the industry.
"……It really did grow quite a bit."
I muttered it for no particular reason.
"If it feels like too much, you don't have to answer right away. Read it first and think about it."
"Okay. I will."
Holding the tablet, I hopped down from the sofa.
My stubby little legs weren't yet long enough to reach the floor in one graceful motion.
Even on the way back to my room, my eyes refused to leave the screen. My heart pounding like mad at this first-of-its-kind experience as an actor was, I suppose, only natural.