The One Who Has Something to Protect (3)
The conference room where the script reading for Cat Guardian Spirit was to be held had been buzzing since early that morning.
The making-of crew bustled about setting up cameras and lights, and the leads, supporting actors, and staff who trickled in one by one had barely finished their greetings before they were tearing into the snacks laid out on the table and settling into gossip. Plenty of them already knew one another from other projects, and the mood was warm and easy.
"Hey, three cameras for a script reading? That's a lot of pressure. Guess I'd better actually try."
"They're saying our show is the most talked-about project of the first quarter."
"Talked-about? Not anticipated?"
"What's the difference? What matters is that people are paying attention. I picked this one because the script was decent and Seo Ji-joon was the lead, so I figured it wouldn't flop—and with buzz like this, we completely lucked out."
"True."
The actress cast as the female lead's friend dropped her voice, suddenly conscious of the making-of cameras.
"Think she can actually act? Lee Songha?"
"Aigoo, I'm sick of this. Do I have to hear that question here too?"
The actress in her thirties shook her head, thoroughly fed up.
"The second I said I was doing this drama, everyone around me wouldn't stop asking. I even got calls from reporters. They want a comment on how Lee Songha's acting was the moment the reading's over. Ugh. Leave the kid alone already."
"But you are curious, aren't you?"
"She'll have the basics, at least. Even after the controversy blew up, there was never a word about her dropping out. W&U must have something they believe in, or they wouldn't be pushing this hard."
"Right. And if she were truly terrible, Director Shin wouldn't have cast her, would he?"
Amid the speculation, the actor playing the subordinate to male lead Seo Ji-joon cut in.
"Since it's come to this, I actually hope Lee Songha is really good."
Eyes turned his way, and he shrugged.
"Public opinion's split right now. Half say she'll be awful, half say she won't."
"Right?"
"So she got torn apart over her acting, but if the twist is that Lee Songha is actually insanely good... don't you think all hell breaks loose the second this thing premieres? The internet's going to explode after the first episode."
The other actors, listening to his voice climb with excitement, let out short laughs.
"Come on. That's a stretch."
"Yeah. I read the script. It's not an easy role."
"Don't say stuff like that and put pressure on the kid. You think her stomach isn't already in knots?"
"I just..."
The actor tucked his tail and clicked his tongue.
"I'm just saying I hope that's how it goes."
Just then the murmur outside the door swelled. Figuring someone else had arrived, the actors all turned toward it.
The door slid open.
The moment a few of them laid eyes on Lee Songha stepping through, the same thought struck them.
If this drama hits, that girl is going to sweep every commercial in the country.
All the haters' talk—stage lighting, makeup, the camera doing the work—was nonsense. Hers was a face you had no choice but to admire the instant you saw it. Classical and refined lived together in her features, and her proportions left nothing to fault. There was no need to pile on flowery praise.
She only had to stand there, and she was already a picture.
Advertisers would have no choice but to covet her. Shake off the acting controversy, clean up her image, and if the drama did well enough to hand her the halo of a hit and a breakout character on top of it, she had more than enough in her to plant herself overnight as a visual star.
Which was exactly why a few of them thought something else as well.
The acting will be just so-so.
Prejudice had its foot in the door. She came from an idol girl group. She was still young. And above all, she was too beautiful.
If her looks had been a little lacking, they might have held some expectation for her acting. But with a visual like that, even a slight shortfall was worth W&U pushing through. Looks were a weapon that could more than paper over whatever the performance lacked—the same way those top-tier beauties landed on the chopping block over their acting every time they took a role, and still went on to dominate the commercial world and field endless offers from the networks.
So the cast of Cat Guardian Spirit folded their expectations entirely. All they hoped was that Lee Songha would manage the basics, that she would act just well enough not to damage the work.
Once the reading began, though, every one of them sat there dazed, thinking the same thing.
What is that?
That's a twenty-year-old kid? Someone who's already eaten a lifetime's worth of insults over her acting?
"......What is going on."
"You're telling me......"
Had there ever been a script reading where the actors sank this deep into the work?
Not only the leads, Seo Ji-joon among them, but the supporting actors too delivered their lines as if they were already on set. And the moment their turn passed, their eyes drifted, naturally, to a single place.
To Lee Songha. No—to Jung Haewon.
From the instant the reading started, only Jung Haewon had occupied that seat. A woman in her late twenties, prickly by nature, worn thin by life. She was there in every gesture, every breath.
It hadn't felt like this at the start.
Lee Songha's acting had all but shattered their expectations, and they had cheered. At this level they could overturn the current public opinion and take both quality and a hit at once, they told themselves, and they congratulated one another before anything else. Then they started whispering.
"Looks like Lee Songha's real personality is a lot like Jung Haewon's."
"Right? That's completely raw. Unvarnished. She looks like she's actually living it."
"The kid did seem cynical and high-strung, older than her age."
"This is totally the role of her life. Director Shin must have cast her after seeing that at the audition."
But that didn't last either.
Jung Haewon was not a role that ran in a single style. Interpreting the absurd things the cat ghost rattled off, she had to carry black comedy; possessed by the cat ghost, she had to turn aristocratic and elegant, a performance entirely unlike Jung Haewon.
In the end someone muttered, tongue clicking in disbelief.
"Unbelievable. She's just...... born with it."
"She's twenty, right? Of course she was born with it. Kids like that are real geniuses. Geniuses."
"The world's so unfair. Her life's going to be easy."
Jang Yoon-ok, cast as the mother of the male lead, Kim Seung-woon, caught the voices in her ear and frowned.
Most of the murmuring was admiration, but envy they couldn't quite hide ran underneath it. In a few of the younger actors, not so far from Lee Songha in age, there was jealousy as well.
She looked ahead. Lee Songha was still lost in nothing but the work.
Jang Yoon-ok kept her voice low, so as not to break the reading.
"If that's all you can see, then keep your mouths shut."
"Sorry?"
"Teacher, what do you..."
The young actors beside her glanced around, flustered. She was the eldest actor in the room, someone called Teacher wherever she went, and she had just turned that look on them. Of course they flinched.
"Born with it, yes. Otherwise this at her age wouldn't make any sense."
But Jang Yoon-ok's eye had caught on something other than the talent.
"Even so, she's not a kid who trusts what she was born with and takes the easy road. Look at her. When she delivers a line, she barely looks at the script."
"......!"
The young actors' eyes went wide.
Looking closely, there was something unmistakably off about Lee Songha's performance. The script lay open in front of her, but her gaze never followed it. Instead it rested, a little at a time, on the empty tabletop, the floor, the wall—as if something were actually there.
She wasn't reading, and still every line that left her mouth was perfect. Impossible, unless she had it memorized cold. Their eyes locked onto her script.
Someone gasped.
The edges were worn to rags, and everywhere Jung Haewon's lines appeared, the pages were packed with handwriting as fine as grains of rice.
The actors who had let their jealousy show laid their hands over their own scripts, as if to hide the shame.
Jang Yoon-ok looked at Lee Songha again.
She seemed not to feel the stinging gazes fixed on her at all, and the astonishing performance simply went on. Whenever Lee Songha spoke, even Director Shin Tae-gyun—meticulous to a fault with his direction—kept his mouth shut. Not only him. Kim Pan-seok, CEO of the production company Pan Production, and writer Hong Joo-mi wore thoroughly satisfied faces.
Preparing her own lines, Jang Yoon-ok thought, Through this project, a rather fine actress is going to emerge.
The actors were not the only ones stunned.
In the row behind them, the staff flipping through scripts and watching to see whether their own actors were holding up were just as busy murmuring every time Lee Songha's turn came around. It was only natural. Not one of them had expected acting of that caliber from her. And not only them—anyone who knew about the controversy would have thought the same. The surprise landed several times harder for it.
The reading wasn't over, so they were only whispering, swallowing their agitation. Meet a reporter once it ended, though, and they could run their mouths for two hours on Lee Songha's acting and still have more to say.
The chief manager who had come with his company's hottest supporting actor muttered under his breath.
"Where did W&U dig up a find like that? This industry's a small pond. How does something like that pop out of nowhere without a single rumor first?"
"I thought so...... figures. She's that good, so of course the division head is escorting her around himself."
From the seat on his right, a team leader from another company spoke up.
"Division head? What division head?"
The chief asked it quietly. Their actors had worked on the same project before, and the two of them were fairly close.
The team leader flicked his eyes toward the man sitting on the chief's left.
"That guy. They say he's a division head at W&U."
"What?"
Eyes wide, the chief whipped his head around. The man on his left had been sitting at ease the whole time, watching Lee Songha's reading. Now and then he looked openly impressed; now and then he smiled, satisfied. And strangely, he kept filming her on his phone.
Jung Sunwoo, wasn't it. His face hadn't looked ordinary to begin with, so the introductions had been a little awkward—but at the time he had definitely said he was a manager.
"Come on. What division head. He's clearly younger than me."
"Age only counts in school. Parachuted in, I bet."
"When we introduced ourselves earlier, he told me he was just a manager. You sure?"
"First time I'm seeing him today too, but you know Chief Lee Bong-joon next to him, the one handling Seo Ji-joon. Chief Lee called that guy Division Head earlier. I heard it myself."
"Wait...... that can't be right. Isn't W&U's division head the guy who's going a little bald?"
"Maybe they changed it. Anyway, I clearly heard him called division head."
The chief wet his rapidly drying lips and stole a glance sideways. Knowing the title, the man looked even less ordinary.
Maybe the day comes when I end up transferring to W&U myself...
Thinking so, he cleared his throat and addressed Jung Sunwoo in a friendly tone.
"Excuse me—why do you keep filming that? For monitoring?"
"Ah. This?"
Jung Sunwoo answered, then paused. Whatever he was thinking, he stared blankly at the phone in his hand.
The satisfied smile that had been lingering at his mouth a moment ago vanished without a trace. Smiling, he had only seemed neat and composed. With the smile gone, it was not a face one approached lightly.
He answered slowly.
"I have an important use for it."
The chief swallowed hard.
It was clearly a soft voice. So why did it sound like Because there's someone I need to kill?