A Name Too Familiar
Fortunately, the film shoot wrapped soon after.
Director Ju-eun Schepper had been cursed out from every direction for so long that she was approaching a state of satiety without needing to eat.
And now the real work began. Of course, the two years spent tearing the screenplay apart and rewriting it had been real, and so had the year of casting and begging for money, and the month of shooting — but from here on out, it was the real real.
Director Ju-eun Schepper holed herself up to edit.
"I'm done with this business. I'm never making another movie. If I ever do this again, I'm not my parents' daughter anymore."
Muttering to herself, she began the edit.
The reason she'd clashed so much with the shooting crew was largely because she'd been making the film on favors scraped together from every corner. The CG, too, had come courtesy of someone she'd worked with long ago — accompanied by a promise to pay it all back someday, on a grand scale, a promise so extravagant she didn't believe it herself.
These days AI handled so much of the work that she'd caught herself worrying whether directors were slowly becoming obsolete, but there was no time for such worries now.
So Director Ju-eun Schepper, fueling her editing marathon with energy drinks bought by the case, cast a bleary, exhausted eye over the footage — and noticed something.
A twist, if you could call it that.
The protagonist keeps being written off as a madman, but the alien creature was real. And more than that, the creature genuinely loved the protagonist. That was why it tried to return to the protagonist's body. The protagonist resists, but fails — and in the organ it comes back to, there is no life left to give.
Because the object of that love was grotesque, Director Ju-eun Schepper had wanted the plot to feel strangely familiar on paper. Familiarity, she figured, would balance out the bizarre. And Lee Heeyoon had read that intention with pinpoint precision.
She had wondered how anyone would express so tangled a being. Lee Heeyoon found the answer in something utterly ordinary and universal: love.
He simply, ordinarily, acted a man in love. She could hardly believe that a boy of barely sixteen had grasped the intention and delivered a performance like that. Come to think of it, at the audition he'd played a mother bereaved of her child, and the wife of a husband deemed heartless. That had been a genuinely singular choice.
It was only partway through editing that Director Ju-eun Schepper belatedly realized why Lee Heeyoon had, out of nowhere, brought the wife's performance from that drama to his free-acting audition.
"Oh. That's why."
Voyage of Evil is the story of a couple who lose their child and react in perfectly opposite ways. The husband believes life must go on regardless; the wife cannot accept it — how could anyone lose a child and go on living a proper life? It is a play about two human beings who cope with unspeakable grief in opposite ways: how far they will collide, and how far they will wound each other. That was Voyage of Evil.
And the one the wife of that play loved most, to the very end, was her dead child. She was in love with the thing that could never return, the being she could never look in the eye again.
Lee Heeyoon had chosen the wife's role to show just how well he could portray exactly that kind of love.
Director Ju-eun Schepper hurriedly pulled up the video of Lee Heeyoon's free-acting audition. What she hadn't seen while sitting right there watching it was visible to her now — how detailed that performance had been. The depth of an acting she had dismissed as merely remarkable amid a field of inexperienced actors.
"He knew. Before the shoot ever started."
What this film was about — Lee Heeyoon had known from the beginning. He'd known it as well as she did.
This was a film about love.
The story of two beings who fell in love with something that did not exist in this world.
Lee Heeyoon had taken the performance of a being he considered unworldly, found it in the everyday, and carried it into the film.
There was only one word a director could offer: genius.
This shoot had been unusually brutal.
The waiting stretched long enough as it was, and with the weather heating up by the day, the heavy prosthetic makeup meant that no amount of air conditioning in the car could keep my temperature down.
The very day filming ended, I fell asleep as though blacking out, and when I opened my eyes the next morning, the Leader Actors staff were shaking me awake and telling me to go to the hospital.
And the absurd diagnosis was: air-conditioning sickness.
Burning hot while acting, then blasting the AC in the car because of the heat — and that, apparently, was enough to give me air-conditioning sickness. The human body really is a fragile thing.
I was sitting on the living room sofa at Wooheonjeong, drinking my herbal medicine and watching a newly released drama on TV, when I heard Do Jaeyeon nagging VP Gam Soohan.
"See? I told you we need to feed him things that are good for him. What is this, Eol-bak-sa? It should be Dang-saeng-cho."
Dang-saeng-cho meant carrot, ginger, and dark chocolate. She was evidently every bit as proud of her homemade concoctions as ever. VP Gam Soohan fidgeted helplessly.
"I know Heeyoon doesn't care about taste, but carrots and chocolate together is a bit much……"
"What's the problem? He drinks it without a single complaint."
"He only drinks it because he's too sweet-tempered to say no."
"You are the only person on this planet who calls Lee Heeyoon sweet. If you're comparing him to your college classmates, then those people aren't normal. What kind of school did you attend, a den of villains? No wait — if you went somewhere like that, how are you the nice one? Is something wrong with you?"
Good grief. It's honestly fascinating how VP Gam Soohan can't see it, even when she wears her feelings that openly. Then again, there's an eight-year age gap between them, so that ajusshi probably can't even imagine it.
Their love life was their own business. I turned my attention back to the drama.
The waits on this shoot had been so long that I'd watched a lot of dramas in the meantime. I was especially enjoying the new superhero series that had just come out.
It was a prequel of sorts, about the birth of a famous villain.
The best thing about turning eighteen was, without question, that I could watch movies and dramas all day without ever tiring of it. Well, occasionally I did get so worn out I wanted to throw up, but that was my own fault for overestimating my stamina. In any case, my body never gave out on me — I could watch the great masterpieces over and over. A beautiful thing.
While I was absorbed in the show, VP Gam Soohan had come over and settled in beside me without my noticing. The drama was rated for ages fifteen and up, with a notice that minors required guardian supervision. Soon Do Jaeyeon took a seat as well.
That was when CEO Gam Seongbeom came home from work and said,
"A sick kid watching something this intense?"
Then he sat down too. CEO Gam Seongbeom all but melted into the sofa and said to me,
"Hey, ever since you've been living here, I come by more than I did when Father was alive. Just keep living here."
"That's not really my decision to make."
"And Mother doesn't seem likely to come back from the main house anytime soon."
As he spoke, CEO Gam Seongbeom reached for a cigarette, and Do Jaeyeon smacked it right out of his hand with the edge of her palm. Clutching his forehead, he resigned himself to watching the drama instead.
With the four of us gathered like this, it genuinely felt like a family. When I groaned and winced, they all fussed over me in turn, checking how I was doing.
We'd sat around watching dramas like this before the regression, too. Mostly at the office, but even then, I'd loved it.
Maybe that showed on my face, because CEO Gam Seongbeom said to me,
"If you're set on having a family, don't marry too young. Stay single and act for a long, long time."
"I'm not getting married."
"Why not?"
"Just not."
With that, I focused on the drama.
That villain was originally one of the antagonists from a comic featuring a hero called 'Foucault'. Woo Woongbae had lectured my ear off about it just recently.
So I'd started watching, and it was fantastic.
This Foucault was a hugely famous hero franchise — multiple film versions, and an endless sea of spin-offs built around a single villain.
There was a 1990 version and a 2018 version, and I preferred the latter. But it hadn't done well at the box office: a planned trilogy had been cut off after only two films, canceled outright.
CEO Gam Seongbeom spoke up.
"I hear there's a plan to launch a new Foucault trilogy in three or four years."
"It'll get pushed back."
"It'll get pushed back."
I said it, and Do Jaeyeon said it, almost in unison. Neither of us had ever once seen one of those plans actually arrive on schedule.
VP Gam Soohan looked at me and said,
"A film three or four years out…… who knows, maybe?"
"……"
"Woongbae said it before. That he'd love to see you in Foucault. I think it's his favorite movie of all."
He'd never said that to me, of course.
Woo Woongbae rarely talked to me about what roles I should play, what kind of acting he'd like to see from me. Even about Foucault, he'd only ever said it was fun. Only ever said it was his favorite comic.
"He wants you to play Noah Crane."
I called Noah Crane to mind.
A politician who weighed nothing but profit, down to the last coin. Though really, "politician" undersold it — Noah Crane was the most famous demagogue in fiction.
"Noah Crane."
And yet, strangely, the name felt familiar.
Far, far too familiar.
The next day, Lee Heeyoon visited Woo Woongbae's house. Even though it was evening, Woongbae was still running errands on set and hadn't come home yet. Woongbae's mother welcomed me warmly.
"Well, if it isn't Heeyoon, it's been ages. What am I going to do about that boy, running off to Wooheonjeong every single day?"
"I like it there."
"Well, that's a relief, but…… oh, come in, come in. Stay for dinner."
"I already ate."
"Eat again anyway. At your age, two dinners is normal."
Then Woongbae's father chimed in from behind.
"Actors are a different breed. Eat when you're hungry, and if you're managing your weight, it's fine."
"Then I'll take you up on it next time."
"Right, right. Oh — should I at least bring you some fruit?"
And so, snacks in hand, I climbed the stairs.
Then I found Foucault on Woongbae's bookshelf. And there it was — the monologue Woongbae had read and reread until the pages were soft, the one he loved most in all the world.
I read it carefully, thoroughly. Then, as if stepping onto a stage, I began to act.
Something was wrong.
I had sunk into the role in a single breath. Like feet pulled under by a swamp — without my own will.
As if it had been mine from the very beginning.