Become a Star

At this point, Woo-Jin realized that something was off, and he glanced at Yi-Sak. Since the latter had been secretly looking at the actor, their gazes met. Things were fine up till now when suddenly, Yi-Sak jolted and trembled.

“Did I do something that made you uncomfortable?” Woo-Jin asked.

Although they were around the same age and had debuted at similar times, they weren’t close enough to talk casually yet. Woo-Jin had made sure to be polite to them, but he now wondered whether he had done something that made Yi-Sak uncomfortable. Joon-Ha also tapped his friend’s arm to ask why Yi-Sak was acting so strangely.

“That’s not the reason. It’s because I saw it.”

Yi-Sak hesitated before finally speaking his mind, as it could lead to a misunderstanding if he remained silent.

“Huh? What did you see?”

“I saw your acting in the DSTV interview a few days ago… sir.”

“Oh…”

“I ended up watching it yesterday before going to sleep, so….”

Woo-Jin could only awkwardly chuckle as Yi-Sak described how he had a nightmare all night long from Woo-Jin’s acting. The only reason he’d seriously performed the role of a murderer was that people had asked him to, but the reaction afterward was a stark contrast from what he initially expected.

After his performance, Lee Jin-Ah just sat in her seat, frozen solid as she stuttered over her words, unable to make proper progress through the interview. The chat remained silent for a while before all kinds of messages popped up at once like an explosion. It was full of comments about what the viewers had just seen, from jokes like how some people punched their monitors because they were so terrified to people confessing that their love for Woo-Jin had wavered for a moment.

If they had seen Woo-Jin’s performance in a movie or show, the viewers would have admired his acting skills. They would’ve recognized the character on the screen as someone separate from Chae Woo-Jin. However, this new performance terrified them because Woo-Jin had been smiling until just moments ago before he abruptly showed them his performance. And so, the audience was unable to distinguish fiction from reality.

Lee Jin-Ah’s condition was even worse than the viewers’ as she had been sitting right next to the actor, but since they were near the end of the interview already, she managed to end the broadcast properly. Yet, the more critical problem was that a clip of Woo-Jin’s acting had been edited and uploaded on the internet.

After that incident, the way people treated Woo-Jin changed significantly. There was a great divide in the behaviors of those who saw the performance and those who hadn’t. Whenever Woo-Jin got on an elevator, anyone who’d been waiting with him didn’t get on, and some who were already inside left, being careful not to meet Woo-Jin’s gaze. One time, the actor lightly bumped into a senior at university, but the latter ended up apologizing excessively to Woo-Jin.

His situation was similar to other actors who were the villain in a movie but got kicked out of restaurants and other establishments in real life. These kinds of events repeated themselves over and over. Still, when people cursed at the actor or kicked them out, that meant there were those who were still willing to stand up to him. But in Woo-Jin’s case, people were so afraid that they avoided interacting with him altogether.

It was the first time he had been ignored to such an extent since his debut.

Still, Woo-Jin thought the other celebrities would be fine around him, but it turned out he was wrong. Yi-Sak’s reaction was the same as the general public, which bewildered Woo-Jin. When he saw the members of Delios on TV, they seemed like pleasant people, so Woo-Jin thought they would still laugh and joke around with him even if they had watched the clip.

“It wasn’t that scary, though….”

Woo-Jin muttered an excuse. Even CEO Jang Soo-Hwan had reprimanded him, saying that he should’ve held back instead of wasting his skills unnecessarily. Yet, Woo-Jin thought he didn’t deserve such a scolding.

“It really was that scary… sir!”

Yi-Sak rebutted Woo-Jin's words.

Woo-Jin and Yi-Sak were the same age, so the latter would typically have spoken casually with the actor. However, today, he kept adding ‘sir’ at the end of his sentences. Yi-Sak felt that if he acted too casually with Woo-Jin, then the terrifying gaze that kept appearing in his nightmares would be directed at him in reality.

Woo-Jin was trying to relieve Yi-Sak’s stress and trauma since the idol couldn’t even make eye contact with him. As he did so, the book under Yi-Sak’s hands caught Woo-Jin’s attention. These days, he had witnessed a lot of people reading Confession of White here and there. Even those who had no intention to audition for the role were reading the book since it had become a hot topic recently.

“But wasn’t I less scary than that novel? I ended up closing the book and taking many breaks when I was reading it before because of how scary it was.”

Having found a topic they could all discuss, Woo-Jin exaggerated his experience a bit. He thought his acting was bearable compared to Lloyd’s terrifying character in the book, but he had forgotten one tiny detail.

“At least Lloyd is pitiful… sir.”

Yi-Sak smiled cheerfully before he slowly remembered that evil face and added another ‘sir’ at the last moment. Woo-Jin’s acting was engraved in his head. The dramatic change in Woo-Jin’s expressions in that video stimulated even greater fear in him. Yi-Sak even started wondering whether a real murderer would look like that.

Perhaps a true murderer’s face would show no signs of malevolence at all, seducing their victims with beautiful smiles and reassuring them as they hunted their prey. Yi-Sak wondered whether the devil was a being that normally hid among ordinary people and only revealed its true nature in times of weakness.

Yi-Sak couldn’t help but admire Chae Woo-Jin’s acting, which made him feel these emotions from a simple, short clip.

It was Yi-Sak’s dream to be an actor, and he looked alternately between Confession of White in his hands and Chae Woo-Jin.

“Would you like to have this book… sir?”

“Huh? Weren’t you reading it?” Woo-Jin asked as he saw the bookmark stuck about a third of the way through the book.

“Well, I’m not sure why, but I feel like I won’t need this anymore.”

Joon-Ha stared at Yi-Sak for a moment, astonished by what his friend had said. He was surprised to see Yi-Sak give up on Confession of White so easily, knowing how much effort the latter had put into understanding the novel. Every time Yi-Sak saw a word he didn’t know, he always looked it up in a dictionary.

However, Joon-Ha then looked at Chae Woo-Jin and nodded as if he knew how his friend felt. While he couldn’t understand Yi-Sak’s reaction because he hadn’t watched the video, Joon-Ha acknowledged Chae Woo-Jin’s acting skills.

Every actor in the world knew that they were only auditioning for the role of Lloyd to develop themselves and grow as an actor. In reality, they were aware that there was no hope of getting cast. In terms of probability, Yi-Sak believed there was no actor in South Korea who could compete with Chae Woo-Jin for the role of Lloyd.

Who on earth could ever beat the Chae Woo-Jin?

“Read it even if you don’t feel the need anymore. I also kept giving up part way through, but when I finally finished it, I thought it was truly worth the time and effort. And, if possible, read the original version and not the translated one. The translation uses a lot of difficult words and flowery rhetoric and doesn’t properly capture the realistic expressions of the original.”

“You mean the original English version? I can’t read English well enough!”

Yi-Sak jumped in surprise at Woo-Jin’s advice. He was sulking so much that he even started to speak casually with the source of his nightmares. He knew simple words in English, but not enough to read an entire novel. In fact, he was at the level where he needed a dictionary just to read a book in Korean.

“Weren’t you reading the book to audition for the movie?” Woo-Jin inquired.

“I was…”

“Since the movie will be produced in the United States, the audition and filming will be conducted in English, though.…”

The language one spoke was an immensely vital aspect of acting since emotions needed to be processed and conveyed to the viewers. Most of all, the movie would be filmed and released in the United States, so if the actor performed with clumsy pronunciations and speech, the film would not be able to avoid criticism and disapproval from the original novel’s fans.

Of course, it was likely that the actor would fail at the auditions before such a thing could happen, though.

Yi-Sak and Joon-Ha’s eyes widened at this revelation. They had wrongly speculated that the actor for Lloyd would be able to perform in Korean since the protagonist could be Asian.

“If Lloyd spoke Korean, then that would completely ruin the original novel more than anything else.”

Yi-Sak and Joon-Ha finally got a reality check when Woo-Jin told them the production team would never allow such a situation to occur.

One of the reasons why Village’s Do-Ya passed the auditions for a Hollywood movie was because he was handsome and tall, but the most important reason was that he spoke excellent English.

A high level of proficiency in English was necessary just for a supporting role in an American movie, so there was no way the production team would choose a lead who was terrible at English.

“Ah, oh….”

“Told you it was hopeless from the start.”

Joon-Ha had long since given up on auditioning for the role, and he teased Yi-Sak smugly, apparently ignoring the fact that he’d also held onto such vain hopes not long ago.

The audition craze made the hearts of many idols and actors flutter with hope and expectations, but many of them ended up despairing soon afterward.

***

Selena’s gaze was sharp and cold as she stared at Ilya. Her eyes had always been full of respect and admiration, but for the first time, they were filled with dissatisfaction and complaints.

{You escalated the situation far too much.}

{What are you talking about?} Ilya feigned ignorance.

{The audition. I didn’t want the situation to develop like this.}

When she initially offered the idea of holding an audition, Selena intended to secretly test the four actors that had been nominated.

However, Ilya spread the news about the audition and promoted it extensively with the use of his connections in the industry. Now, the situation had intensified too much to announce that they had already nominated a few actors for the role and that the audition was only for them.

Most importantly, the atmosphere and opinions that the Confession of White fans was showing were quite threatening. They were fans of L. Dmítri and secretly considered Ilya Turner a rival to defeat. It was possible that this was why they didn’t want to acknowledge and recognize Ilya as the person in charge of the film’s production. They even harbored suspicions that Ilya was trying to ruin the movie on purpose.

It was strange and incomprehensible why they were so hostile towards Ilya Turner despite not even knowing who L. Dmítri was. Yet, it was also quite amusing. No one considered the possibility that Ilya and L were the same people.

Some individuals shared the opinion that Ilya could not write a challenging and experimental novel like Confession of White. They were proud of L. Dmítri, who had shaken the global literary industry with a single book.

Funnily enough, L’s fans were the only group of people that dared to slander Ilya Turner, a writer who was loved by people in the US and around the world. Perhaps they considered Ilya to be L’s rival.

And so, to no one’s surprise, L’s fans lost their minds when it was announced that Ilya Turner would participate in the production of Confession of White’s movie adaptation. They then officially asked the CEO of the novel’s publishing company to confirm Ilya’s involvement, as they knew L. Dmítri personally.

The fans were suspicious that there was some sort of misunderstanding or that an outside force had pressured L into allowing Ilya’s involvement.

“Ilya and L have always been good friends.”

With this testimony, the entire chaotic situation came to an end.

There was no reason to refute the fact that L—the writer they worshiped—trusted Ilya and had him manage the adaption in his place. Instead, the fanbase kept a wary and doubtful eye on the film’s production, carefully monitoring everything. This was now a situation where the fans wouldn’t let any issues pass and would nitpick everything.

As such, Selena couldn’t announce that they had already secretly selected the candidates for the role and would hold an audition with only them. If she did, the entire fanbase would erupt in an uproar.

When making a live-action adaptation of an existing work, there was bound to be some troubles and complaints if the production team didn’t embrace the current fans and acknowledge their presence. Even when the movie was released, the fans would protest about every minor detail and belittle the film, giving it poor publicity.

As a producer, she had to take the fans’ opinions into account, whether she liked it or not. Yet, the issue was that she couldn’t do every single thing the fans wanted.

There was not a single case where an adaptation had gone well and received positive scores when its production was swayed and influenced by the original fans. The best way to make an adaptation was to make the fans trust the creators and eagerly await the completed work. However, because of Ilya’s actions, everything went wrong from the very start.

{How could you create such a mess when you haven’t even signed the contract?}

{Contract this, contract that…}

Ilya frowned as Selena kept annoying him about the contract when all he needed to do was sign the piece of paper.

Currently, his agency and Selena were negotiating the terms and conditions, but the contract would be signed soon. Considering how he had refused and avoided her for the past several years, things were advancing quite speedily right now.

{Now that it’s come to this, we have no choice but to hold a large-scale audition to satisfy the fans.} Selena grumbled.

{Then you should just do that. Why are you so flustered?}

{Was there any actor among the candidates who caught your eye?} She asked.

There was no reason for him to create such a commotion for no reason. Selena scowled at him insolently. Ilya was definitely scheming something.

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