The Audition for Giyeon
Juggling preparation for the school's Regular Performance Survival and the audition for the film Giyeon at the same time was no easy feat.
I asked Vice President Gam Soo-han, who was reading the Giyeon script with a grave expression on his face.
"Why are you reading it so seriously?"
"Because I'm wondering whether you can actually pull off this role."
Then he handed me a play script.
"What's this? Didn't you say you wanted it?"
It was the Arthur Miller play that was holding open auditions.
The film would wrap in a month, but of course the preparation periods had to overlap.
Before Giyeon had ever caught my interest, I'd already been eyeing that production. Ah, that one was something I genuinely loved.
"If only there were a serious way to split my body in two…."
"There isn't. Even if there were, the answer's no."
Vice President Gam Soo-han said it flatly. Honestly, if he'd told me I could split in two, I probably would have felt a little hurt.
Every now and then it occurred to me that Vice President Gam Soo-han had died in my past life before turning thirty. People who leave early are always romanticized, and those who live short lives are said to have sinned little—I'd once delivered a line to that effect in a play. But there was nothing romanticized about him; he was just, as ever, a good person. He never betrayed me. He flew off on his own before he ever got the chance to.
For a moment my chest tightened, and I kept my mouth shut.
The people at this company had made me attend two funerals. Gam Soo-han and Do Jae-yeon. Every so often, the portraits I'd seen back then flashed before my eyes. I changed my own profile photos on a whim, but for the two of them, there had been no recent pictures at all.
That was why, these days, I'd been having my photo taken a lot—but I'd also started occasionally taking photos of the people at the company. Not, of course, for use as funeral portraits. I was going to keep every one of these people alive somehow.
My revenge is simply to make them come to my funeral. I truly did not want to think about those two funerals again.
Then a thought struck me, and I asked Vice President Gam Soo-han.
"Hyung."
"Hmm?"
"If you came to my funeral, would you cry?"
I asked out of genuine curiosity, and the eyes of Vice President Gam Soo-han—whose mental fortitude ranked somewhere around that of a newborn rabbit—went perfectly round.
"What kind of talk is that? How old are you compared to me, and I'd go to your funeral? You'd be the one coming to mine."
"You never know with life."
"No, I do know. You're absolutely coming to my funeral."
"Don't assume that. Brace yourself mentally. That's life for you."
Uh-oh. This was bad.
I couldn't speak for anyone else, but Vice President Gam Soo-han would almost certainly cry at my funeral. I'd only mentioned my funeral, and already his eyes were reddening at the mere thought of it.
I figured I should start weaning people off their affection for me around age thirty or so. Easy. All I had to do was the opposite of everything Do Jae-yeon told me not to do. Talk back to my elders, snap "why are you praising me for doing what's expected?" when complimented, curse anything below my standards as subpar, and so on.
Yeah, something like that should do it.
And even then, if the soft-hearted Vice President Gam Soo-han still had any lingering attachment to me, I'd just hide somewhere far away. Vanishing without anyone knowing whether I was alive or dead wouldn't be so bad either.
By that point I'd have plenty of money, so disappearing from the world entirely wouldn't be impossible.
That was what I thought, while Vice President Gam Soo-han's expression gradually turned serious, and he began asking me things—whether school life was going okay lately, whether I was perhaps just a late bloomer going through adolescence, whether anything was weighing on me.
"Stop talking nonsense and go back to reading the script."
I said that, but Vice President Gam Soo-han went on watching me for a while with the worried eyes of a bull.
The day of the Giyeon audition.
While Ju-eun Schepper was getting the audition ready, Do Yeojin—the female lead of Giyeon—walked in. Ju-eun Schepper held out a bag of rice crackers.
"Want some?"
"No."
"Right, why would you eat cheap snacks in bulk. You barely eat as it is—you should be eating the good stuff."
Saying that, Ju-eun Schepper tore open the rice crackers and popped one in her mouth. Then she dumped the rest into a big tub set out in the waiting room for audition participants.
As she played hostess in her own way, Do Yeojin asked,
"Do you really think nervous actors are going to eat those?"
"Probably not. But even when they're not nervous, most of them don't touch anything—they're all on diets."
Do Yeojin nodded and said,
"This script is honestly bizarre. Right up to the end, our CEO kept asking if this was really okay…."
"Did you stamp the contract? Don't tell me you're backing out."
"I will. I'm going to do it—I just think it's weird, that's all."
"You say that now, and then you'll do brilliantly."
"I signed the contract, so of course I'll do it properly."
With that, Do Yeojin hugged the script tightly to her chest. Then she asked Ju-eun Schepper,
"So Soo-han recommended an actor from his company? Wow, look at us—when did my classmates grow up enough to start pulling strings for each other?"
"Hey, what strings are there to pull for a tiny film like this? And the kid's supposed to be eighteen, eighteen. There's no way he gets cast."
"But I saw him. In The Garden of Manyusa. He looked like an actual fairy, that kid. So pretty."
"Word is he's grown. Apparently he's about Gam Soo-han's size now?"
"Already?"
While the two of them were talking, actors began filing into the waiting room one by one.
This was, for all intents and purposes, a one-woman film. Aside from the role of the husband and the role of the grotesque creature, most of the parts had no more than a line or two. Today, auditions for both major roles were being held.
The audition for the husband was相当 demanding. Most of the applicants had similar looks, and they performed in similar ways too.
Not that they couldn't act—but the vast majority were performing at the level of a few months' training at an academy.
In the end, Ju-eun Schepper cast the actor who looked the most like Do Yeojin's husband. After the first round of auditions wrapped, she leaned back in her chair and sighed.
"So in the end, it's not the face, not the acting. It's the chemistry."
"Chemistry includes the face."
"Fair point."
Ju-eun Schepper nodded, satisfied.
Before the second audition began, she made sure to eat a solid meal. The second round, once underway, had clearly gathered people who could act somewhat better than the first crop. The stakes were that much higher.
It was only natural. Between background extras who moved in a crowd and bit players with a single line of dialogue lay, as it were, the whole distance between heaven and hell. And from a one-line role to a credited named role was another era of struggle entirely.
And once you made it that far, the true hours of torment began. Ju-eun Schepper had once heard it described by a friend: it felt like being a fish trapped in a tank with a glass lid. You could see above you, and they could see you too, but no one ever lifted the lid. You didn't even know if you'd ever get to breathe out there. But you no longer wanted to go back down, so you kept ramming your head against the lid—and still no one came to take you out. You got hurt, and kept getting hurt, until one day you gave up acting for good.
The actors who had clawed their way up that staircase, step by step, desperate for air—most of them gave up right there. At the point where effort stopped meaning anything anymore.
At every audition, Ju-eun Schepper harbored the greedy wish to be the one who opened that glass lid.
Still, hearing the same lines from so many actors had worn her down. Then, as the audition neared its end—Lee Heeyoon walked in.
Do Yeojin's lips curled upward as she glanced at Ju-eun Schepper. It was a look, and it seemed they were thinking exactly the same thing.
He really does look even younger in person.
This was, unmistakably, a love story. Grotesque, but unmistakable all the same—the story of a woman who loved her dead husband so much that, even as she herself lay dying, she peeled off the grafted skin and raised it as her own.
It was hard to believe a kid who knew nothing of marriage or love could do this role justice.
Ju-eun Schepper said,
"You came in with a recommendation, so I'll be judging you more strictly than the others."
"Understood."
There had been two pieces prepared: one free choice, one assigned. Most of the male participants had brought an angry role for the free piece, while the women tended to bring crying roles—presumably because rage and tears were the quickest way to show off emotional range.
I can guess—another angry performance.
Just as Ju-eun Schepper predicted it, Lee Heeyoon spoke.
"I'll begin with the angry piece."
Anger, indeed. Ninety percent of the actors who'd auditioned today had performed anger. Ju-eun Schepper crossed her arms and watched the angry performance from a thoroughly skeptical posture.
And Lee Heeyoon began to perform—the wife, raging at a husband from Voyage of Evil, one who set sail for the sea two days after their son's death.
He was playing the wife.
Ju-eun Schepper snapped awake and stared at Lee Heeyoon. She'd positioned every actor sideways for the performances, so his profile was in full view.
It was chilling to watch the face of a mother who'd lost her son, a wife bound to an indebted husband, surface on an eighteen-year-old boy and then vanish. Above all, for one split second, Ju-eun Schepper had the delusion that she was standing in a small fishing village by the sea.
There was no need to watch the assigned piece.
Compared to the other participants, Lee Heeyoon's raw acting ability alone was already a difference of zero and one—but his grasp of the script was overwhelming on top of that.
How is that even possible?
Lee Heeyoon was delivering a performance that not a single actor present today—some ten, some a full twenty-two years his senior—had been able to manage.
Only then did Ju-eun Schepper remember what Gam Soo-han had once told her.
'My uncle—Actor Gam I-hyun—said it. Heeyoon is demonically gifted at acting, but what's most exceptional about him is his screen dominance. When Heeyoon performs… it might sound like an exaggeration, but it feels as though the world I'm standing in changes.'
"Uh—then, the assigned piece."
Ju-eun Schepper cut him off.
"That's enough. You don't have to."
"Why not?"
Lee Heeyoon asked the reason without a moment's hesitation. Ju-eun Schepper answered.
"Because I can already tell you did well."
"Ah."
Lee Heeyoon nodded. It seemed he'd understood that it meant he'd made the cut—but just as he was walking out the door, he turned back, bowed neatly at the waist, and said,
"I look forward to working with you on the shoot."