The Moment Talent Sprouts (2)
"Why do you like that role?"
"Because she's pitiful."
She was right. Jeong Haewon was a pitiful character, and a prickly one.
Raised in an unhappy home, she had thrown herself into studying day and night on the single-minded resolve to succeed by her own strength. She got into a good university. She even studied abroad on money scraped together from part-time jobs. She was a woman who had worked so hard, and lived so hard, that it seemed only fair the world should finally pay her back. But she had one problem. Now and then she saw what other people couldn't. Ghosts.
It would have been best if she could simply ignore them, but Jeong Haewon was so terrified of ghosts that her body locked up at the mere sight of a ghost's shadow. She had tried everything to overcome it. All of it had been wasted effort. In the end that problem drove her to walk out, on her own two feet, of a major corporation she had landed fair and square, and she was working as a freelance hourly interpreter when she met the protagonist.
"You like the role because she's pitiful?"
"Haewon tries so hard and still can't make it, and it wears her down. But it says this drama is a story where everyone ends up happy, so by the last episode she'll be happy too, won't she?"
"Ahh."
"I want to see that."
As she spoke, Lee Songha carefully smoothed the synopsis with her fingers.
"Then why don't you try the Haewon lines in the plot? Just once."
Tossed out like that, the words made Songha flinch. It was the same look she wore every time I asked her to act—the look of someone about to edge away. Goddamn trauma. That bastard of a lesson teacher. I am not letting this go. Not a chance.
"Songha. I don't know what else that teacher spewed at you, but you are absolutely not bad enough at acting to get called a hack. Do you have any idea how many dramas I've watched? How much money I've poured into movie theaters? If I still couldn't tell hack acting from the real thing after all that, I should have quit being a manager a long time ago."
"Ah……"
"Just read it through once. No pressure. There's nobody here but me."
I coaxed her in the softest voice I could manage. The hesitation slowly drained from Lee Songha's eyes, and her well-shaped lips parted. Through the stretch of tension and silence I didn't rush her. I just stared at the lid of the muffin box.
And then……
"For one thing, I really hate cats. And I hate ghosts even more. I'd sooner wring my own neck than get possessed by a cat ghost and interpret for it."
My mouth fell open before I knew it. In place of the Lee Songha who had been polishing off muffins a moment ago, a worn woman in her mid-to-late twenties seemed to be speaking—cold, barbed, and yet unable to fully hide the hollowness and resignation underneath. It wasn't even what you'd properly call acting. She was only running through a short line in a voice so small it probably wouldn't carry more than a few steps, and still, to my eyes, it wasn't Lee Songha sitting there. It was Jeong Haewon.
How could she do that? Was this what it felt like to watch an actor perform right in front of you? Or was I watching the exact moment an extraordinary talent began to sprout?
Sensing my gaze, Lee Songha stole a cautious glance at me. I snapped back to myself.
"Songha."
"……Yes?"
"You're good at acting. Really good. No matter how I look at it, your talent leans a lot harder toward acting than dancing or singing—ah, not that you're terrible at dancing or singing, but next to those, it feels like your gift is concentrated in acting."
Ah. There I go again. Excitement dumped words that hadn't passed through any kind of filter. I couldn't help it. Unless my eye was garbage—truly, disgustingly garbage—there was no room to doubt it. She could really act. What would Lee Songha be like if she prepared properly and actually performed? Just imagining it was enough to make me look forward to it.
"……I'm good?"
As if she'd heard something strange, Lee Songha looked at me with eyes gone slightly wide.
"Yeah. For real. Don't believe that lunatic of a teacher—believe me. Well. I guess believing me is a hard ask. I'll find you another teacher somehow and prove it."
I pointed at the synopsis again.
"Keep going."
There had been hesitation the last time. This time she opened her mouth at once, and text I had all but memorized came back carrying feeling. Even while she delivered the lines, Lee Songha kept flicking glances at me, as if checking my reaction, so I held a smile wide enough to cramp the corners of my mouth. It seemed to steady her. With every line that passed, her voice rose, and her expression grew far richer.
Before long she finished the last one. It was almost painful how few of Jeong Haewon's lines the plot synopsis contained. Damn it. I want that script. Now. No—I want to shove Lee Songha onto a set. And I wasn't the only one. I could feel the same regret in her.
"Well? ……Was it fun?"
The corner of her mouth lifted as Lee Songha clutched the synopsis in both hands and nodded.
"Acting was fun from the start. But……"
"But?"
"The teacher said the other members were probably expecting me to succeed at acting and raise the team's profile, and wasn't that pathetic. That clinging to something that would never work was a burden on the team, so I should use that time to practice dance and singing more…… so I quit."
Lesson teacher. No—even "teacher" was too good for him. A psycho.
"Hoo. I'm going to go grab that guy by the collar."
"Don't."
I turned, startled. The meeting-room door stood open about two centimeters, and through the gap Kim Hyunjo and Team Leader Park were peering in. How long have they been like that? They pushed the door wide and came inside.
"We actually went to see that teacher this morning and had a talk with him."
Kim Hyunjo said it with a scowl.
"Even if the kid had been seriously bad at acting, a man who calls himself a teacher shouldn't run his mouth until he gives a student trauma. I went and tore into him. He stonewalled the whole time, but in the end he admitted his own words had gone too far. He agreed to apologize to Songha separately for that part. And as for my hunch that there's some other scheme……"
Right. That mattered more than a tidy apology.
"His reaction was a little fishy, but there's no evidence, so there's nothing we can do for now."
Kim Hyunjo clicked his tongue, plainly unsatisfied.
"He just shuts it down with, as far as he's concerned, the kid couldn't act."
"Any connection to Son Chae-young……?"
"That's a sensitive matter. We can't bring it up without something solid."
Team Leader Park took it from there.
"You don't go after someone on a hunch alone. The Team 2 leader would be up in arms, and Son Chae-young would raise hell. We need something that could actually serve as evidence. I'm not saying we bury it. I'll look into it further, so wait a bit on that."
Times like this, it would be nice if the future-sight tossed me a hint…… I thought it, then shook my head hard. I'd benefited from the ability a few times, and now, whenever something got even a little frustrating, a what-if itch kept surfacing. If I started leaning on it like an addict, that would be a problem of its own. Either way, I had to keep digging on my own.
"For now……"
Team Leader Park suddenly grinned, playful.
"Songha, go get a good review from the public. Right where that teacher can see it."
"Yes?"
"Good enough that you can tell him, I'm not the hack—you've got a dog's eyes, so if you're going to keep teaching lessons, swap those eyeballs out first. Work hard and earn yourself a decent evaluation."
So that's what this is.
"Watching from outside, Songha's acting looked pretty good. Let's see if there's anything decent in the winter and spring lineups and start looking into auditions from here."
Now. Sudden, but I couldn't miss the timing. I hurried to push the Cat Guardian Spirit synopsis forward—and in that instant Team Leader Park muttered,
"The Little Mermaid Who Came Ashore is the best of them, though."
"That was the first one I thought of too. One of our own actors is the lead, so…… but of all people it's Son Chae-young, which makes it awkward."
"Heard of anything else?"
"Timeslip, the one slotted into IBC's Wednesday-Thursday. I hear that's decent. The writer and director have done several projects together and scored huge hits, and along with The Little Mermaid Who Came Ashore it's being called one of the most anticipated shows of the winter. But since Son Chae-young passed on it, the reaction might not be great. Oh, right—there's also a drama Sung Do-won is weighing."
"That one's fully pre-produced, so it airs next summer. A blockbuster with a budget of fifteen billion won. The audition competition on this one will probably be the fiercest."
"Yeah? What about you two, Songha and Fortune-Kicker? Anything you like among the three?"
Get her in. Please, get her into all three.
"I……"
I met Lee Songha's eyes once, then slid the Cat Guardian Spirit synopsis out in front of them.
"Team Leader. Chief. Please just take a look at this."
Kim Hyunjo and Team Leader Park put their heads together and flipped through it.
"Isn't this what Songha was just reading? This going in as a new project too?"
"If they'd already shot it, we would've heard by now. Where's it from?"
"It got a January slot on TVL. They're casting leads and supporting roles right now. The director is Shin Tae-gyun, a PD at TVL—his directing is good. His last project was Killing Me, a mystery romance, and it cruised along with a peak rating of five percent."
"Ah, I watched a few episodes of that. The direction was tight. Really gripping."
Interest caught, Kim Hyunjo scanned the synopsis more closely. Team Leader Park nodded too.
"A peak of five percent on cable is a solid showing."
"Hong Joo-mi is a name I haven't seen. What's this writer's previous work?"
"Ah—is the new one a TVL in-house production?"
The two of them fired questions one after another. Before I answered, I steadied myself.
I knew this show would be a smash on cable, and that it would be exported to the Chinese market and hit hard enough to turn its leads and supporting cast into Hallyu stars. But that was a future only I knew. A drama was a massive business. It wasn't something I could force through by sheer stubbornness on my own. If I wanted Lee Songha in this project the way I hoped, I first had to persuade the person concerned—Songha herself—and second, Kim Hyunjo and Team Leader Park, standing right in front of me.
Fortunately, Songha, who had been behind an iron wall, seemed almost won over. Now I just needed these two to nod. The problem was that it didn't look easy.
"It's not in-house. Pan Production is making it."
"Ah, an outside company? A lot of outside production houses are on shaky ground, so you have to look hard. Plenty of them run out of budget and then refuse to pay the actors—sue us if you dare. What else have they made over there?"
"It's the company CEO Kim Pan-seok set up after he left TVL. This is their first project."
"Uh…… really? A startup? And the writer?"
"Hong Joo-mi. She wrote two romance novels that were well received, but this is her first drama. I read the novels. Her prose is strong, and she draws characters in a very three-dimensional, appealing way."
I'd expected it, but Kim Hyunjo's and Team Leader Park's reactions were pretty bad.