The Genius Actor Who Lives Twice - Chapter 33

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Chapter 33

10 a.m.
An independent film theater in Seoul.
A banner reading “18th Youth Short Film Festival — Finals” hung from the wall, and staff moved busily about, making final preparations for the screening.
Inside the auditorium, only five judges occupied seats scattered throughout the room.
The last to enter was film critic Baek Jun-ho.
Having been selected as a judge, Baek Jun-ho exchanged only brief words with the staff before settling into a theater seat.
Soon after, the theater lights dimmed gradually.

‘Hmm. More mediocre entries than I expected.’

Baek Jun-ho reclined in his chair and watched several films.
There were films made by students, films shot by office workers after their shifts ended.
Films shot on mobile phones, and films that appeared to have cost tens of millions of won.
He evaluated them all by the same standard.

‘This one collapses in the second half, and that one’s opening never gains traction.’

The way he delivered his cutting verdicts brought to mind a general drawing his sword on the battlefield.
Baek Jun-ho was notorious among critics for giving stingy scores.
So far, not a single work had impressed him.

“Next, we have entry number twenty-nine.”

The light on the screen faded, and silence blanketed the theater.
A moment later, a title appeared against the black screen.

A mask borrowed to wear another’s face. Just as his curiosity kindled at why this cool, austere word had become the film’s title, a voice broke through the silence.
-“Rolling camera.”

The black screen rippled, and a soft-focus angle opened up.
As the lens slowly found its mark, a man finally emerged within the rectangular frame.
His face rigid with tension.
Baek Jun-ho’s eyes narrowed.

‘Wait. Isn’t that the kid I saw at that audition the other day?’

It seemed he’d been cast in this film.
With that thought, Baek Jun-ho decided to focus on the work itself.
Film is ultimately the director’s art.
No matter how raw and unpolished an actor may be, weak directing will wear them down to nothing on screen in an instant.

-“Ready, action!”

At the cue, the man on screen moved mechanically, a prop knife gripped in his hand.

-“Is it all right to kill someone?”

Baek Jun-ho’s head tilted slightly to one side.
The acting was far from assured.
A jaw that trembled as if seized by convulsion,
Eyes that wavered with uncertainty.
In the moment a doubt flickered—was that actor ever capable of more than this?—the man on screen halted mid-movement.
NG.

-“Damn it!”

In that instant, the camera jolted sharply, abandoning its fixed frame and swinging hard to the left.
The woman playing the director, her hat pulled low over her eyes, couldn’t hold back—she spat out her words like venom.
A water bottle flew across the screen and landed hard at the man’s feet, discarded.

-“Cut! Hey, Min-woo. Have you never played a murderer before? Why does it look so fake? There’s no venom in your eyes—no venom!”
-“I’m sorry, Director. If you’d just give me one more chance—”
-“What? A chance? You think I’m joking? How many NGs are you going to give me? It’s all the same! You didn’t even rehearse!”
-“No, I did… I did, but I got… nervous.”
-“God. This is exactly why I don’t use rookies.”

I’d never seen this woman before, but she wasn’t bad.

‘Give her a few years to polish herself, and she’ll be worth using.’

But my attention kept drifting back to the male actor.

-“That’s enough. I’m calling someone else, so get out of here.”
-“What? Another actor? But I was the one cast… Director, I’ll work harder. I’ll prepare all night and come back. Please. Don’t cut me.”

At the moment when cold dismissal collided with desperate pleading, the screen began to shrink slowly.
The shape of a film reel, accordion-like in its connected segments, appeared on screen.
The image was positioned on one edge of the reel.
Then a massive film roll reversed, spinning backward as the entire screen rewound rapidly.
Even film critic Baek Jun-ho, who had watched countless movies, was seeing this method of flashback for the first time.
A place that looked like Min-woo’s studio apartment.
Here, Min-woo receives the call about passing the audition.

-“Really? I passed the audition? Truly? Sob… Thank you. How long has it been since I passed anything?”

Having heard the good news through the phone, Min-woo kept bowing his head, wiping tears from his eyes. He brushed his chest, collecting himself quickly.

-“Okay, calm down. First I need to figure out how to play a murderer.”

Min-woo stepped in front of the mirror and studied his reflection.
He twisted his expression into something menacing, then tried widening his eyes and forcing out rough, jagged breaths.

-“I’m a killer, I’m a killer.”

But in the mirror, the man’s eyes still shimmered with clumsy, innocent brightness.
The practice was sloppy rather than fierce.
And then the camera cuts back to the cruel present moment on set.

-“We’re going again. Min-woo. This is your last chance. Really.”

At the director’s icy warning, Min-woo’s pupils quivered visibly.
The anxiety of an actor standing on a cliff’s edge poured out thickly, bleeding through the screen.
On set, filming resumed, and Min-woo gripped the prop knife.
The film-within-the-film presented a serial killer rehearsing murder.
The stabbing motion was violent, but the actor’s shoulders in the frame remained hunched and rigid.
Excessive tension born of desperation.

-“Idiot! What kind of murderer drives the knife in with so much force? Relax your shoulders, you bastard!”
-“…I’m sorry. I’ll try again.”
-“That’s enough. I’m calling someone else, so get out of here.”
-“What? Another actor? But I was the one cast… Director, I’ll work harder. I’ll prepare all night and come back. Please. Don’t cut me.”

After uttering his desperate plea, Min-woo finally sank to his knees on the floor.

-“Why are you making me out to be the bad one too? Huh? Is there no pride without talent?”
-“P-please, Director. Just one more chance, I’m begging you….”
-“Get out! Didn’t you hear me?”

Leaving behind the sting of contempt, Min-woo fled the set like a man cast out.
The mechanical rattle of the subway car, the merciless downpour lashing his face.
He returned to his studio apartment, darkened by rain clouds, and stood weightlessly before the mirror.

-“Was my Acting really that terrible.”

His shoulders sagged, his hair plastered to his forehead with rainwater, the strands clinging damply to his skin.
The man reflected in the glass was sunk in a darkness of his own making.
Min-woo picked up the Prop Knife he’d brought back from the set and returned to the mirror.
He traced through the choreography, thrusting the blade forward, but his heavy heart weighed his performance down—each movement limp and listless compared to before.
Yet afterward, Min-woo continued to practice for hours.
He did not rest.
The rain-soaked clothes dried stiff, only to be drenched again in sweat that poured from his body, clinging and congealing to his skin.
His face had begun to resemble a mask that was slipping away from itself.
And just as his Acting was beginning to improve, Min-woo’s phone rang.
When he heard the voice through the speaker, the color drained from his face entirely.

-“Your father… he’s passed away….”

The call ended, and the studio apartment filled with a heavy, suffocating silence.
Min-woo stood frozen like stone, staring blankly into empty space.
From the depths of his collapsing chest rose a desolate sorrow, crystallizing into transparent tears that gathered at the corners of his innocent eyes and fell.
His father’s death.
Standing before a tragedy he could not bear, he shuffled back toward the mirror with leaden steps.
There, he gazed quietly at his own face, grotesquely contorted in the glass.

-“…So this is the expression I wear when I’m in pain.”

In that moment, something chilling in his voice made Baek Jun-ho’s spine crawl.

-“Yes. This is it. This is true emotion.”

Min-woo resumed the murderer’s performance he had been rehearsing.

-“I am nothing but an animal hungry for superiority. Wave after wave, the urge to stab washes over me. Is my character’s purpose merely to kill? No. My role is far simpler than that. To shatter another’s dignity, to trample it underfoot, to feel absolute supremacy. What does a pathetic insect’s life matter anyway.”

Across his tear-streaked face, a ghastly smile bloomed. A true murderer.
What gaze would a predator wear—one who held another’s life in his hands and shook it like a toy?
He descended deeper into madness with each passing moment.
Days of rehearsal. Rehearsal and more rehearsal.
Then one evening, the Min-woo in the mirror spoke to him.

-“Stab him. Blood. You want to see blood, don’t you?”

And the Min-woo outside the mirror answered.

-“No. I’m not that kind of person.”

The camera turned back toward the mirror.

-“Yes, you are. You’re a murderer. You feel superior in another’s ruin.”

The camera pressed close against the mirror’s surface, then began a slow, deliberate pull backward.
In the widening frame: Min-woo standing before the glass.

-“You want to see blood.”

Min-woo hurled the words at his own reflection in the mirror,

“I’m not that kind of person!”

He rejected himself violently, staring into the glass.
One body. Two selves.
A mise-en-scène of utter disintegration unfolds within the cramped studio apartment.
Two personalities, locked in irreconcilable opposition, finally converge into one, and Min-woo fixes his gaze upon the figure beyond the mirror with a clarity that chills.
Then he opened his lips, cold and deliberate.

“I’m like an animal thirsting for superiority.”

Crack!
The screen plunged into blackness again, suspended in unbearable tension.

“Could I kill someone?”

The voice cutting through the darkness drew Baek Jun-ho’s body forward instinctively.
When the screen illuminated once more, his eyebrows twitched sharply.

‘Kim Su-ho?’

The appearance of this unexpected figure was a shock.

“The thought just came to me, you see.”

That shallow line Min-woo had just delivered with a bitten tongue transformed the instant it passed through Kim Su-ho’s lips—becoming a barbed thorn that embedded itself deep within the ear, heavy and inescapable.
His voice was perfectly controlled, yet brimming with an unfathomable abyss.

“Mmm~”

Jin-tae drew the prop knife through his fingers with deliberate slowness, as though combing through a lover’s hair, the motion dense and intimate.
An eerie play that marred the line between childlike innocence and the cruelty of one who could sever a throat without hesitation.

“It simply occurred to me. So…… I prepared quite thoroughly.”

The faint twist at the corners of his bloodless lips formed a smile so glacial it froze the marrow of all who beheld it.

“Haah…… Where should I cut to draw out something beautiful?”

He murmured in a drowsy, cajoling voice, while his other hand swept across the mannequin’s neck with exquisite gentleness.

‘Kim Su-ho’s improved even more as he’s grown. I thought he was already complete.’

As these thoughts formed in Baek Jun-ho’s mind—

“Cut! Okay! That’s it, Jin-tae! I knew you’d know how to set the stage.”

The director, his cap pulled low, released the tension that had gripped the set and replied with evident satisfaction.

“Thank you, Director.”
“Good, good. Everyone’s done well. Take a quick break, grab some food, and we’ll move straight into the next scene.”

The director stepped outside. He pulled a cigarette from his pocket, wedged it between his lips, and flicked his lighter to life.
A long plume of white smoke rose and curled through the air in lazy wisps.

“That one from back then… no redemption there whatsoever.”

The words fell as muttered reflection, ash glowing white, at that very moment—

-“Aaaaaaahhhhh—!!”

From deep within came a scream that seemed to tear eardrums apart.
The director, cigarette tumbling from his fingers, rushed into the set.
And there, he witnessed it clearly.
An actor utterly consumed by the madness of his character.

-“Director.”

Beneath the spotlight, Jin-tae lay sprawled on the floor, drenched in blood, gasping for breath.
And in the eerie silence that followed, only one figure stood unmoved—Min-woo.

-“This is… the true acting you spoke of, isn’t it?”

The staff’s horrified stares and ragged breathing saturated the air of the set.
Min-woo swept his gaze coldly across the trembling crew, leaving crimson footprints behind as he walked, making no move to wipe the blood that flecked his eyes.
He began rummaging through the equipment stacked to one side.

-“Here it is.”

What he held was none other than a clapperboard.
With bloodied hands gripping the clapperboard, he approached the camera standing alone on its tripod.
In that instant, the film’s angle shifted abruptly to the camera’s lens perspective.
Min-woo’s hollow eyes, fixed straight through the screen.
The audience felt a chill run through them as they sensed that chilling gaze piercing through the screen, aimed directly at them.

-“Hah.”

Min-woo’s rough breath fogged the camera lens white.
Beyond the opaque, blurred screen, the silhouette of a man raising the clapperboard blurred into view.
Slowly, he brought the slate down.
Clap—!
With the sound of the slate snapping shut, the screen faded to absolute darkness.
And breaking the silence, Min-woo’s final voice emerged—low and cold.

-“Cut.”

And so the film ended.
Soon the End Credits began to roll up against the black.

[Min-woo / Yeong-gi Jun]
[Jin-tae / Kim Su-ho]
[Director / Han Seo-hyun]
[Director of Photography / Baek A-rin]
[Screenplay / Yeong-gi Jun]

Baek Jun-ho, seated among the judges, remained speechless for a long moment, lost in thought.
Was it possible that all those tragedies and madness—his dismissal by the director, the loss of his father, the character consuming him entirely—had been nothing but a “mask” constructed for this film?
Persona.
The mask an actor wears.
Baek Jun-ho distilled his one-line review of this chilling work into words in his mind.
He wrote his review on the paper before him.

The mask worn by an actor melts beneath the heat of the lights, until at last it adheres to skin—and so the mask becomes the face, the expression itself.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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