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“Hyung?” Jiwoong looked up from his phone. He had been scrolling TikTok at a low volume, trying to understand what it was that Hao and Gyuvin had been saying about the ‘long Armageddon challenge’. Going onto aespa’s official account, it seemed like all of the challenges were the same length, but the two had been so excited after their last group practice to film something to go on their page.
Yujin looked at him, holding a notebook against his chest. Jiwoong sighed, locking his phone and slipping it into his pocket.
“Yeah? Everything ok?”
“Oh, yeah, for sure.” Yujin slid into the seat near Jiwoong. Wordlessly, Jiwoong passed over a bowl of popcorn he had been munching on, knowing it was a snack Yujin enjoyed. They were in the middle of promotions for their summer album, and Yujin always had trouble with his appetite when they were promoting. Like his hyungs from his group before, he was determined to make sure his youngest brother was eating enough, so he tended to keep some of Yujin’s favorite snacks around to get some calories in him around performances. This just happened to be a day when Jiwoong had been snacking too. He saw that cute and wide-eyed expression on his maknae as the younger boy leaned forward to grab a handful of popcorn, popping a few pieces in his mouth gratefully. “Thanks, hyung. I didn’t realize that I was as hungry as I am.” Jiwoong nodded.
“What did you need?”
“Oh, right… well you know how I’ve got a break with classes right now, so I have had a bit more free time?” Jiwoong hesitated before nodding. He wasn’t sure ‘free time’ is what he would have called the evenings they had to crash and try to recuperate between music shows, but he knew that Yujin wasn’t used to so much unscheduled time. He’d been putting in some extra lessons with the vocal coach that WakeOne had hired for the group, and had been taking a few extra dance classes here and there, but he’d still been a little listless around the dorm. The past few nights, however, he had been coming home at night and holing up in his room, exiting only to grab some dinner and then disappear back into his room.
”Sure. What have you been up to.”
“Well, I decided to do a little bit of research.”
“Oh, really? About what?”
“Well, you know, a lot of idols when they get too old or have injuries or don’t wanna do shows and tours and things start acting.”
“Sure.” Jiwoong sat up now, anticipating some sort of question about acting. When he had tried to debut before and things hadn’t quite worked out with his previous groups, Jiwoong had turned to acting. He’d gotten a few decent roles, and been a part of the acting world. He assumed that Yujin had some questions about the job.
“So I decided to start looking into what it would be like to act and I figured a great launching off point would be to pick an actor I liked and watch all of their work.” Jiwoong nodded again. He’d gone through a similar phase with Lee Dong Wok when he’d begun his acting career.
“That makes sense. Who did you research?”
“Well, I figured it would make the most sense to study someone I could interview. Which is why I have a few questions.” Yujin uncapped his pen and set the popcorn aside, opening his notebook. He looked over his notes and then back at Jiwoong, expectantly.
Jiwoong blinked at him a few times. He tried to wrack his brain to figure out who he might have mentioned in the acting world that he knew. He still kept up with a few of his former coworkers: Park Eunwoo, though she mostly was getting small roles lately. Na Hyun had a rough go of it, but since leaving SONAMOO she’d been doing ok. Neither of them seemed like the inspiration that Yujin was after. Maybe Seobin? Jiwoong hadn’t had the chance to talk to him much the past few months, their times on their respective survival shows having gone quite a bit differently.
And then, looking into Yujin’s eager expression, it hit him. Yujin didn’t want Jiwoong to introduce him to anyone, he wanted Jiwoong to answer his questions.
Jiwoong’s acting career flashed before his eyes as he remembered the days on set, the pages and pages of dialogue he’d memorized. And then like a montage each romance scene he’d been in flashed before his eyes and caused his face to flush a brilliant shade of red.
Oh god. What did the maknae watch…?
“Oh. Uh. Yeah. I can do my best to answer your questions.”
“If there’s ever something you feel uncomfortable about answering, you know you don’t have to, right?” Yujin’s eyes grew so wide and innocent. He was a teenage boy, and Jiwoong was always the first to remind the rest of the group that. Gyuvin in particular had this habit of babying the boy, and when Jiwoong was in the maknae line of INX and ATEEN, he knew the frustration of being coddled or underestimated. Not that the older members tried to, but Yujin was so much younger it was easy to wave him away as the “baby”. But at the same time, munching on his snack and looking with such an expectant expression, Jiwoong couldn’t help but feel like Yujin was the baby brother he would do anything for.
Even if it meant spending the rest of the evening in an embarrassing conversation.
“Yeah”. Jiwoong cleared his throat. “I’ll let you know if the question becomes… difficult for me to answer.” Yujin nodded and looked down at his notebook. “Hey, uh, how many of my shows have you watched, by chance?”
“All of them.” Jiwoong tried not to grimace as Yujin looked up from his notes. “Well, all the shows listed on your wikipedia... almost? I don’t know if there were more I missed… You can feel free to correct me!” He looked back down and Jiwoong resisted the urge to google himself to see what discomfort awaited him. “The first one I watched was The Sweet Blood.”
“Ah, right. That’s still online, huh?” Yujin nodded, beaming.
“Yeah! I kind of enjoyed that one, considering the writing… left something to be desired for me, personally… it kinda goes all over the place with the plot… which brings me to my first question: Do you always like the projects you took as an actor? LIke when you’re reading them or auditioning beforehand?” Jiwoong grimaced.
“Uh, that’s one of those questions in a real interview I’d have to find a creative sort of answer for.” He grimaced, remembering some of the dialogue from The Sweet Blood in particular. “To you I can say no. I didn’t always LOVE everything I acted in. Most actors rarely do. But especially at that point in my career… honestly I just needed a paycheck and needed something to add to my resume. More connections in the industry. At least, that’s what I told myself the whole time…” He sighed. “I’d sort of given up for a time on the dream of being an idol, at least I’d given up on being part of a group. I thought maybe if I got enough attention as an actor, I could go into OSTs for the shows I was in or something.”
“Oh. I see. So do you still want to act?” Jiwoong paused, thoughtful. His mind had been so full of ZeroBaseOne and promotions and the two and a half years of this, he hadn’t had time to think much farther ahead.
“I guess I’m just waiting to see what happens, you know? I’m on the older side of idols now and I don’t know if I can keep up much with the schedule of being as busy of a group as we are for too much longer… but that’s for Jiwoong-Of-The-Future to decide.” He grinned at Yujin. “Best not to worry about a future with so many variables.”
“Yeah, that makes sense.” He looked up from his notes. “For what it’s worth, I thought you did great with what you had given to you.” He scanned his page again. “I do have one question. You had a line, one I don’t know if I fully understood the context of it and I wondered how you went about preparing for the scene. It was one of your first scenes, where you said ‘I don’t care about what the sex is’?”
Jiwoong resisted the urge to facepalm. Yujin didn’t mean any harm, but Jiwoong couldn’t help but flash back to his pronunciation during the Love Killa stage practice at Boys Planet. He assumed the mumbled pronunciation was quite the same, even if he hadn’t rewatched that particular web show in years.
“Um. Well. For the character he was trying to come off… seductive.” Jiwoong grimaced again. He blinked back almost physically remembering those awful contacts he’d had to wear for the shooting. “I like to focus on character motivation especially in the more… fantasy-based scripts. So the character was trying to get the boy to trust him so he could… you know… drink his blood. And in the past he’d just been seductive and charming to get what he wanted from humans most often, so that’s where I went to first.”
“Do they, like, give you a backstory or did you have to come up with it on your own?”
“You use context clues in the script.” Yujin was dutifully scribbling down notes a Jiwoong talked, and it almost took away the painful embarrassment of the scene. “But sometimes you need to connect the dots on your own. Sometimes the director or producer have their own ideas for how they want lines delivered, but other times it’s more up to the actors there.”
“Right, so did the other actor know that your character seduced other guys?” Jiwoong tried not to cough out of discomfort. Yujin seemed so earnest in his questioning, if this question had come from anyone else in the dorm he would have punched them in the arm.
“We talked over how the scene would go, yeah. Acting well has a lot to do with your comfort with your scene partners.”
“So the girl, she knew you both wanted to drink the human and that you were kind of… propositioning him?”
“Yeah, she did, we talked about it.” Jiwoong cleared his throat. “Uh, any other questions about that show?”
“Oh, no, we can move on.” Yujin flipped the pages in his notebook as Jiwoong breathed a sigh of relief. “When did you start training as a runner?”
“What?” Jiwoong blinked in confusion towards Yujin. It was pretty known in the ZB1 dorms that of the members, Jiwoong was the least likely to enjoy plain cardiovascular exercise. Running wasn’t something that ever really appealed to him, and he had no idea where Yujin had gotten this from.
“Running. Professionally. Well, not professionally but definitely seriously.” Jiwoong looked at Yujin’s face to see if there was any hint of jest. As always, however, Yujin looked over his paper at him with earnest interest.
“Yujin, what would make you think I am a serious runner?” The younger boy glanced down at his papers.
“Don’t Lie Rahee.”
“Oh my god, ok!” Jiwoong practically face-palmed. “No, that was just a character.”
“But… you played a championship runner.” Jiwoong raised an eyebrow.
“Do you think that I became a vampire because I played one, Yujin?”
“Obviously not, vampires aren’t real. Runners are.” Jiwoong laughed and put a hand on Yujin’s shoulder.
“When you’re acting, you don’t have to be able to do or know everything your character does. Do you think Lee Dong Wok went through the police academy to prepare for his role in Bad and Crazy?” Yujin paused.
“No, probably not. He’s a very busy man.”
“Exactly.” Jiwoong leaned back onto the couch. “So I didn’t really prepare seriously for the role. I was only running in a few scenes anyway, I just wanted to make sure I didn’t look obviously weird when I ran.”
Yujin nodded. “That does explain it.” He scribbled in his notebook.
“Explain what?” Yujin looked back up at him.
“Why you looked so awkward when you ran. I thought maybe it was an advanced training technique but now I understand it’s because it’s not something you do often.” Jiwoong’s face flushed, and he grabbed his drink, frowning.
“Alright, enough of that, ask your next question.” He took a big sip of his drink, hoping to get rid of his suddenly dry throat.
“Sure.” Yujin looked down at his notebook again, flipping the page. “When did you realize you were attracted to Seobin?”
Jiwoong spit his drink out all over the coffee table.
“Oh, Hyung, are you ok? Let me get you a napkin.” Yujin jumped up from the table and ran to the kitchen, grabbing a roll of paper towels to help him mop up the mess. Jiwoong coughed, taking a paper towel to wipe off his face.
“Where– what–” Jiwoong watched as Yujin finished helping him clean up. “What made you think that I was attracted to Seobin.”
“Well, when I was watching Kissable Lips I assumed that was the only reason you’d take part in that show. The writing… left something to be desired.” Yujin grimaced. “Honestly, your characters were so stupid, yours in particular but also Seobin’s? He was just going to sit alone with a vampire? Who he knew wanted to kill him because of his super special blood? And don’t get me STARTED on the ending, to have you just disappear into nothing? I was so mad.”
Jiwoong brought a head to the bridge of his nose.
“Listen, Yujin. Sometimes, when you are struggling, you just have to take the job, right?” He sighed. “Like Hoetak hyung. He had no right to be on Boys Planet because he’s a member of a highly successful nationally acclaimed boy group, but his company wanted him to be on the show, right?” Yujin nodded. “So, when I landed a lead role, a gig that paid decently and let me have more experience, I took it.”
“So… it had nothing to do with Seobin.”
“No.”
“... So then why did you do Roommates of Poongduck 304?”
“Well,” Jiwoong could feel the flush on his cheeks. “Seobin and I got along very well, and when another opportunity presented itself to work together, we both took the job…” He rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. “Listen, Yujin, sometimes you take the job because it’s a job, sometimes you get to work with the same people again and it’s lovely because you got along well before. It just happens the way it happens.” Yujin considered his words, thoughtful for a moment, before he started scribbling some notes into his notebook again.
“What about the Good Bad Mother, do you have any questions about that one?”
“Oh,” Yujin shook his head. “I haven’t had any time to finish that one. You’ve only been in one scene and you just kinda stood there.” Jiwoong sighed. If he was honest, that’s what he did during most of the shooting for that show anyway. “You’re really good at standing awkwardly, though.”
“Thanks Yujin-ah.” Jiwoong closed his eyes, leaning his head back on the couch. Any other questions you have for me?
“Just one!” He looked back down at his notes. Jiwoong waited with baited breath, hoping the question would be less intrusive than the last.
“When you were filming Convenience Store Junkies, did you get to eat all the food you bought?” Jiwoong sighed, shaking his head.
“That’s really what you wanted to know?”
“Well, I didn’t really have a lot to go on with that show, you just sort of stood there looking hot…” Yujin frowned, looking over his notes. “Which, honestly, you did a lot of standing in a lot of different ways.” His face brightened. “Maybe that’s what I can focus on now, different ways of standing for different effects!” Yujin smiled at Jiwoong, his face beaming as he hugged his notebook close to his chest. “Thanks, Hyung!”
Without another word, Yujin sprung up from his seat and hurried back to his room, passing a very confused looking Hanbin.
“Well he looked excited about something.” Hanbin moved to sit on the couch beside Jiwoong, flopping down and putting a hand on his shoulder. “Aaaand you look horrified.”
“Just do me a favor?” Hanbin leaned forward, nodding.
“Yeah, what is it Hyung?”
“If Yujin comes over to with questions about your career before Boys Planet, just smile and walk away.”