Miscast, or a Masterstroke? (4)
CEO Kim Pan-seok cleared his throat and asked.
"That tailored look you came in — did you put it together for the Jung Haewon role?"
"Yes. It says Haewon always dresses like a career woman."
Lee Songha explained it calmly.
She wore a formal blouse beneath a coat, and trousers that showed off the long line of her legs. The ankle boots had a heel high enough to make you dizzy. The effect was thoroughly urban, and there wasn't a thread out of place — the kind of grooming that suggested a woman strict with herself.
"You're well prepared."
"Thank you."
Dressed like that, she already resembled Jung Haewon in more ways than one. Above all, she didn't look twenty in the slightest. Kim Pan-seok ran his eyes down Lee Songha, then leaned toward the two people beside him and asked in a low voice.
"What do you two think?"
"Sir, look at her script."
Screenwriter Hong Joo-mi whispered it.
Every gaze went to the script in Lee Songha's hands. The thick stack of A4 pages was visibly worn from handling, and the margins beside Jung Haewon's lines were packed with notes — she had clearly worked hard on the character.
The handwriting was so bad they couldn't make out a single word.
"Looks like she put in real work."
"The attitude's good."
Director Shin Tae-gyun muttered it, indifferent.
Even so, Songha's eagerness had unmistakably shifted the three of them. A moment ago they had meant to hear a perfunctory audition, explain why she wasn't right for Haewon, offer a little advice, and send her on her way. Now they were at least prepared to watch her act in earnest.
Kim Pan-seok opened the script.
"I'll mark the scenes. Try acting those parts."
"Yes."
"All right. Part one, page thirty-six. Scene fifty-one. Let's start there. It'll be easier if someone feeds you the other lines, so... Director Shin, you want to? Or should I?"
"If you don't mind, may I?"
The voice came out of nowhere, and Kim Pan-seok turned. In the seat beside Lee Songha, the man who had introduced himself as Jung Sunwoo already had his own script in hand.
"I read opposite her when we practiced, so I thought Songha would be more comfortable."
Songha's face had indeed loosened a little, as if something in her had settled.
Kim Pan-seok nodded.
"All right, then. Jung... er, are you a chief manager?"
"I'm a manager."
"Then the manager can read, and we'll get started."
At the cue, the manager began delivering the third-party lines.
Kim Pan-seok tilted his head. The reading was skilled and smooth — not the work of someone who had glanced at the pages once or twice. And that was enough to make him suspicious of the man who called himself a manager.
Say manager and most people pictured a road manager first. But chief, team leader, department head — the titles changed, and underneath they were all managers.
Young-looking on the outside. Was he someone who had grown up in this business?
While that suspicion was drifting somewhere strange, Lee Songha's performance began.
"Other people live hard. I lived just as hard — hard enough to die doing it."
Kim Pan-seok's head snapped up.
Lee Songha was staring into empty air as if she were sick to death of the sight of it.
"But because of people like you, there's nothing left for me. Only me."
He had assumed a former singer would have decent vocal production, but this was far better than he had expected. Her breath was steady, her diction flawless, every word landing clean in the ear. The tone itself was genuinely attractive.
More than that, it didn't feel like an acting voice. None of the exaggeration peculiar to newcomers, none of the bad habits — perfectly smooth. She didn't look like someone consciously managing breath and placement line by line. It was as natural as if she had been born with the gift.
This is a lot better than I thought.
Kim Pan-seok muttered it to himself. The thought didn't last.
The longer Songha's performance went on, the wider his eyes grew. A long while later he clicked his tongue and revised the verdict. This wasn't merely good.
So W&U had been raising a monster. How young had they started her lessons, for acting this impossible to come out of someone her age?
Lee Songha's performance changed the air in the office. The narrow room went so still it felt stifling. Aside from her voice, you couldn't even hear anyone swallow. Everyone was that locked on the acting in front of them.
Kim Pan-seok glanced at the seat beside her.
The manager feeding lines with easy skill. When he had nothing of his own to read, he watched Songha act with a pleased look, then drew a satisfied smile, as if the mood of this room delighted him.
No wonder he seemed far too relaxed for someone who came for an audition.
There had been a reason. Thinking so, Kim Pan-seok turned to the seat beside him. Hong Joo-mi was staring at Lee Songha as if she might bore a hole through her, a creator's excitement risen plain on her face.
"What do you think, Writer Hong?"
"..."
"Writer Hong. Writer Hong! I asked what you think."
Catching the whisper late, Hong Joo-mi answered in a dazed voice.
"Uh... uh, yes?"
"Never mind. Keep watching."
He didn't need to ask. He already had his answer. Kim Pan-seok patted her shoulder and looked to his left. Only an empty chair sat there.
Director Shin Tae-gyun was standing in front of the test cameras set up on Songha's front and side, his face shoved close to the monitor.
In truth, he hadn't liked this audition from the start. He had been impressed by Lee Songha's looks, and that was all.
He cared more about what lived inside an actor than about visuals. Striking looks could hold a gaze for a moment, but a truly good actor needed an overwhelming presence — the kind that pulled a viewer under before they even noticed.
He hadn't expected a girl-group member to have anything of the sort.
And yet.
Shin Tae-gyun looked at Lee Songha on the monitor.
Desire had filled a face that, only moments ago, had been listless and uninterested. Not this cramped room and a couple of test cameras. He wanted a perfect set, proper equipment, and a real shoot.
At last Kim Pan-seok called the final scene number.
"Part two, page forty-eight. Scene seventy-nine."
The trickiest scene of all: the moment the cat spirit possesses Jung Haewon.
It was one of the reasons they had wanted a genuinely skilled actor for the role. How she played it would decide whether the scene landed with impact, or whether it shrank the world around it and became a public joke for years to come.
Lee Songha, who had been leaning back in her chair, opened her eyes wide.
Still seated, she made no move and no sound. Only her eyes traveled, slowly. A strange tension drew the room taut. As if she had taken in everything around her, she turned her gaze down to her own body. She raised a hand and flexed her five fingers, then put strength into her feet and let it go, repeating the motion several times before she stood.
One slightly unsteady step. A second, gathering her balance.
From the third, she was perfectly steady.
Spine straight, she stood looking quietly down at the floor.
The corner of her mouth lifted at an angle.
"Wait. Hold on."
Kim Pan-seok broke the silence. The question came out blunt, informal.
"Why'd you smile like that?"
"Pardon?"
Songha looked startled, as if she thought she had made a mistake.
"The stage directions don't specify the expression. They just say her eye level is different from when she was a cat, so she glances at the floor. So why the smile?"
"Ah..."
It wasn't only Kim Pan-seok. The other two were staring at Songha's mouth as well. She glanced back at the manager beside her. Only after he nodded — don't worry, just answer — did she speak, calm again.
"This cat is helping the heroine because it says it wants to repay a kindness, but it was abandoned by its original owner, so at heart it dislikes humans. And it's extremely proud. If I were this cat, the first time I looked down after possessing a human, I think this is what would hit me first."
Lee Songha tilted her head down again and murmured.
"A human's line of sight... is lower than I thought."
In that instant, Kim Pan-seok thought it.
Maybe today's audition — the one no one had expected a thing from — would turn out to be a masterstroke for Cat Guardian Spirit.
The audition that had overturned every expectation came to an end, and Kim Pan-seok kept Lee Songha and her manager with an invitation to stay for a cup of coffee. Hong Joo-mi and Shin Tae-gyun vanished into the workroom, saying they had script work to do, and only the head of Pan Production and three PDs sat around the small table.
The PDs went through the motions of drinking, sneaking looks at Lee Songha. Perhaps because the audition had just gone well, her cheeks were faintly flushed, and the face that had seemed scarcely human now felt a little more real.
"Good work, Songha. Have a snack."
"Thank you."
The manager passed her the cookies set out as refreshments. Songha munched and smiled faintly. Struck all over again by how young she was, Kim Pan-seok clicked his tongue once more.
"If we hadn't auditioned you for Haewon, we would've regretted it. We had no idea there was an actress who could act like this."
"Thank you, sir."
"We'll still need an internal meeting, but everyone seemed to see it positively, so you can more or less treat it as confirmed. I'll call you today or tomorrow."
Lee Songha and the manager met each other's eyes. They didn't speak, but it felt as if a couple of exchanges had already passed in a look. The two of them soon bowed. Kim Pan-seok waved them off and brought out the question he had been wanting to ask.
"But why our project? A place like W&U gets the synopsis for just about every drama made in this country, and with your acting and your looks, even without name recognition, I figured you could land a good role on a terrestrial show."
Production PD Park Su-gyeong nodded and chimed in.
"That's right. The Mermaid Who Came Ashore is on PBS's Monday-Tuesday slot, and Son Chae-young from W&U is the lead, so you could have gone in there."
The manager, mid-sip, paused. Park Su-gyeong went on.
"Mermaid and ours are both romantic comedies with a fantasy element. They're Monday-Tuesday and we're Friday-Saturday, but they start around the same time. Why go out of your way to pick ours..."
When the searching looks gathered, Lee Songha's eyes slid toward the manager.
He set down his cup, brushed his lip lightly with his thumb, and said:
"Because I thought this one would do better than that drama."
He said it as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, and the people from Pan Production, who had been nodding along, froze. Then they all wore the same expression.
Is this man serious?
"Um, thank you. We appreciate it, but..."
"Not at all. Finding good projects is my job."
"You might have found the wrong one..."
Park Su-gyeong muttered it low enough that the other side of the table wouldn't hear. Kim Pan-seok, with hearing like a ghost, caught it and glared.
"Why are you throwing in the towel already? We might turn out better than them!"
"Sir, even if our drama is a historic smash, that's a bit much. Theirs is one of the most anticipated titles of the winter season on terrestrial TV. The original's fans are going to be ferocious. People in the industry are projecting ratings over twenty percent."
"...They're saying that?"
"The budget is enormous, and I heard the ads will sell out before the premiere. Their scripts are supposed to be a huge hit too. Honestly, we should just be competing with whatever GTBN puts up in the same time slot..."
The manager, listening to the two of them, dipped his head slightly. He coughed hard, as if the coffee had gone down the wrong way. The junior PD was glancing over, debating whether to offer a tissue, when an expression rose on the manager's face that was impossible to read.
It vanished in the blink of an eye, and the junior PD only scratched the back of his head, wondering if he had seen wrong.
When the cups were empty, Lee Songha and the manager stood. Kim Pan-seok offered the manager his hand.
"Once it's confirmed, we'll do the table read next month and go straight into filming. Please take good care of the schedule."
"Yes. We record Next K-Star every week. If you can clear just that day, the rest is no problem."
"That's a schedule you booked first, so of course. That's the new variety show Knet's doing, right? The one packed with idols."
"Yes. That's right."
"I hope the show does well and Songha's profile shoots up with it. Who knows? In this business, waking up to a different world isn't rare. By the time we do the reading, maybe she won't show up as an unknown rookie. Maybe she'll show up a star."
Of course it was empty flattery, meant to send them off feeling good.
Dozens of variety shows poured out every week. Nobody seriously believed that appearing on a new program with no guarantee of success — a cable variety show, at that — would send someone's profile soaring.
True, as Kim Pan-seok said, someone occasionally exploded off a single variety show, and stories of waking up a star were hardly uncommon in this industry. But the people who enjoyed that kind of luck were only a chosen few.
The PDs of Pan Production all thought as much, and still saw them off with the most positive, pleasant words they could manage.
"We'll be sure to catch it when it airs."
"Our drama and Next K-Star are both going to be huge."
"Lee Songha, and Neptune — you're both going to do really well from here."
Before leaving the office, the manager answered with a peculiar smile.
"I think so too."