The Genius Actor Who Lives Twice - Chapter 39

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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 39

The Practice Room, gathered for the project performance.
From one corner, a sound rings out.
Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.
Choi Yeo-un, slamming his head against the wall.
Lee Jae-seok, the film director, pulls focus toward him.

“Damn it.”

At the curse, Lee Jae-seok bit his lip.
His acting was remarkable, truly.
Choi Yeo-un, an unknown singer, had just received a text moments ago saying he’d been cut from another performance he’d been preparing for.
His band had disbanded as well.
Nothing remained.
Yet even so, he couldn’t abandon his dream.
Thud-thud-thud-thud.
So he was venting his anger at himself, pounding his head against the wall.

“Who is that?”
“What’s he doing?”

Quiet murmurs drifted from those around him.

“Excuse me.”

Lee Ha-eun, playing Haru, gently delivered her line.
Her voice was warm, different from when they’d done the script reading.

“Don’t mind me, please go on.”
“…Is there construction here?”

Choi Yeo-un took it as sarcasm.
His expression darkened at once.
So he answered without deliberately turning back to face her.

“Yes.”
“You must be a singer? I’m a musician—do you happen to know where we’re supposed to meet?”
“It’s written on the wall. The meeting’s in the Conference Room over there.”

His tone was low and indifferent.
At that, the more mature and composed figure took a step back.

“…I apologize.”

Outside the frame, Director Hong Young-do watched the two of them, his face drawn with a hangover, yet his attention fixed on both actors.
There was a difference between “acting tension” and “acting that merely looked tense.”
Lee Ha-eun’s performance was unmistakably the former.

‘I knew they’d been practicing acting together, but I didn’t expect this much of a change.’

Next scene.
The first Rehearsal of the project performance.
Choi Yeo-un in white and Haru in red—their clashing colors filled the frame.

“Could we start over from three lines back?”

At Choi Yeo-un’s request, the musicians nodded in understanding.

“Wait. Could you run through this section again?”

Again, again, again….
After the passage was repeated countless times, the musicians began to show signs of fatigue.

“Why isn’t the cello coming in?”
“Oh, there it is. I got confused for a moment.”

The cellist who had complained of a headache earlier pressed his eyes shut and swept his hand across his forehead.
In the end, they had far exceeded the originally scheduled rehearsal time.

“You just missed that, didn’t you? Let’s start again from measure sixteen.”
“Shouldn’t we think about wrapping up soon?”

The pianist Haru spoke with a frown creasing her brow.
Choi Yeo-un turned to face her sharply, and their eyes locked.
A breathless tension hung between them.
It was Choi Yeo-un who spoke first.

“…You just made a mistake. We should do it again and correct it.”
“No, it wasn’t that big of a mistake. And you made more mistakes this morning anyway.”
“So you’re saying everything is my fault?”

The two of them were now fully engaged, their acting clashing.
Give one unit of emotional energy to your opponent, and they return two in reaction.
And so the gulf between them deepened.

“Since time is running late, I’m saying this for everyone’s sake….”
“The last person to leave the Performance Venue locks up anyway. Let’s start from measure sixteen again.”

Choi Yeo-un turned away abruptly, dismissing her entirely.

“Just stop. Don’t you care about anyone else? How long are we supposed to keep accommodating you?”

Even as anger flashed across Haru’s face, she kept her voice controlled and measured, stopping Choi Yeo-un in his tracks.
The kind of refined anger that Hong Young-do had wanted.
Their eyes met, and sparks seemed to fly between them.

“If we made a mistake, we should do it again, shouldn’t we?”
“But there’s such a thing as moderation in this world, you know. We still have time to prepare. If you’d like an arrangement, I can do that for you.”

Haru took a step back.
And with that retreat, the anger that Choi Yeo-un had been channeling lost its direction.
At the same time, all eyes in the room turned toward him.
As though reproaching him.
But most of all, it was Haru’s gaze that cut through him.
The eyes of someone wise enough to know when to yield, yet wise enough to get what she wanted.
It’s hard to win against someone wise.

“…Let’s call it a day.”

Choi Yeo-un gave ground before Haru’s composure.

* * *

“……Okay.”

Director Hong Young-do watched the monitor with an expressionless face, then gave a signal of approval.
The staff members who had been cursing Lee Ha-eun just moments before now stood amazed at her performance.

“What’s gotten into Lee Ha-eun today?”
“Right? She’s like a completely different person from how she was at the script reading.”
“Don’t tell me she didn’t rehearse before coming. Wow, that’s unbelievable.”

Of course, just as before, they’d moved far enough away that Lee Jae-seok wouldn’t overhear or scold them, and only then did they speak.
Meanwhile, the moment filming wrapped, Lee Ha-eun made her way straight to Ki-jun.

“Ki-jun.”
“Yes, noona.”
“You weren’t actually losing that scene just now, were you?”

They’d rehearsed together, so she knew perfectly well.
A moment ago, Ki-jun had only been pretending to give ground.
If he’d truly unleashed his full acting prowess, it would have been Lee Ha-eun herself who’d been overwhelmed instead.
Which meant that while this scene might make her stand out, she owed every bit of it to what Ki-jun had created for her.
Lee Jae-seok watched the monitor showing Ki-jun’s performance closely alongside Hong Young-do.
He’d already known Ki-jun was naturally gifted at acting, but he’d grown even better than at the script reading.
The rage when his head struck the wall, the irritation, the expression brimming with displeasure—and even the profanities that spilled forth.
What struck Lee Jae-seok most was how Ki-jun had controlled it all so as not to appear villainous, even in moments of raw fury.
What radiated from him instead was pathos.
A dream, an ideal grasped for but forever receding into reality’s distance.
It was exactly the scene Lee Jae-seok had envisioned.

“Hong Young-do.”
“Yes.”
“What do you think of it?”

Hong Young-do kept his eyes fixed on the monitor without turning his head, then opened his mouth.

“It’s good.”

A brief answer anyone sitting in that chair might have given.
Lee Jae-seok’s expression hardened imperceptibly.

“What exactly do you mean it’s good?”

At the noticeably sharper edge to his tone, Hong Young-do turned his head.
Yet his face remained unchanged, utterly unmoved.
As though he couldn’t care less whether Lee Jae-seok was angry or not.

“Lee Ha-eun’s acting has improved significantly. I heard she’s been rehearsing with Ki-jun. She’s definitely come a long way.”

Lee Jae-seok didn’t bother hiding his frustration, exhaling long, heavy sighs as if his chest might cave in.
He hadn’t always been this way.
He was a director meticulous about his work, ambitious and driven.
Visionary, with aspirations of his own, backed by both skill and capability.
When Hong Young-do had asked him to serve as cinematographer for the independent film, he’d accepted precisely because of that overwhelming directorial prowess that made even his senior a figure worth following.
But Lee Jae-seok hadn’t anticipated the man would approach every task with such complete apathy.
A director who did nothing but drink every evening and still show up on set.

“Hong Young-do.”
“Yes.”
“Are you actually fit to direct? Drinking yourself silly every night and then just… coming to the set anyway?”

For just a moment, Hong Young-do’s eyes stirred.
But he didn’t push back.

Nothing but silence.
“I know things have been hard because of what happened before.”

Hong Young-do’s expression hardened at those words.

“But the set won’t wait for us. How many crew members are here? How many actors? You know this Independent Film has a larger scale than most.”

Hong Young-do bit his lip.

“Yes, I know.”
“No, you don’t.”

Lee Jae-seok shook his head.

“If you really understood, you wouldn’t be standing here like this.”

Hong Young-do regarded him quietly.

“I know you’re struggling. But when you’re in the director’s chair, you have to set that aside for a moment.”

Hong Young-do said nothing in reply.
On the monitor, Lee Ha-eun’s face from the take they’d just filmed remained frozen on screen.
On the Film Set, crew members stood waiting with their equipment in hand.
Their eyes held the hope that either they’d need to reshoot, or that they were finally done.

“Go. Say something to the crew and wrap it up. Besides, you don’t even want to keep shooting right now anyway.”

Hong Young-do hesitated for a moment, then rose from his seat.

“That wraps up today’s shoot. Thank you all for your hard work.”

It had been a grueling shoot, so applause erupted alongside cheers of relief at finally heading home.
He turned immediately toward Lee Ha-eun’s side.
Since no one else was there, he spoke more freely.

“Ha-eun.”
“Yes, Director.”

Lee Ha-eun had responded in formal speech, worried someone nearby might overhear.

“You worked hard today.”

He gave her head a gentle pat and then turned to leave the set. On his way back from the restroom, Ki-jun crossed paths with Hong Young-do on the stairs and sensed that the director was holding back an emotion he couldn’t quite name.

A full-length mirror hung on one wall, and scattered across the floor were two pairs of shoes and a Script.

“Yeah, you too.”

I brought up what I’d witnessed the other day—when I’d seen Lee Ha-eun cry.

“You’re close with Director Hong?”

They seemed close, but I couldn’t quite pin down how they knew each other.

“We grew up in the same neighborhood.”
“Ah… I see. So you have that kind of history.”
“And back then, like you said, I wasn’t capturing Haru well. I wasn’t even trying to analyze her properly. Plus, I wasn’t confident I could face her again.”

Listening to him, I found myself wondering how Lee Ha-eun had pinpointed the character of Haru so quickly and precisely.
It’s good when an actor has a rich imagination, but taken too far, it pulls them beyond the script.
They lose sync with the role.
Yet Lee Ha-eun analyzed the character with remarkable speed and imagined her possibilities endlessly.
Her scope of imagination was so broad I’d worried there might be small inconsistencies, but there weren’t any.
I wanted to learn from an analysis like that.

“How did you analyze Haru so quickly, so accurately, and in so many different ways?”

Lee Ha-eun paused in thought, then spoke carefully.

“I haven’t mentioned it before, have I? Look… you can’t tell other people about this?”
“Of course not.”

She drew a deep breath and opened her mouth.

“The character Haru was based on my sister.”

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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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