They teach you how to act

It feels like they’re trying to treat you like a fat sheep to fleece.

Maybe they really are seriously looking for actors,

but that was not how it felt when I went to the interview today.

They packaged everything extremely well from beginning to end.

From the website where they recruit people and the résumé form they ask you to fill out after you go in, all the way to their explanation, everything seemed fairly normal.

The woman in charge of selling the opportunity to interviewees first chatted with you about why you wanted to interview at their company. She also told you about real situations you might encounter on a film set, gradually easing you into the scenario. She even showed you some of the works her company had filmed before and taught you how to act if you really encountered those situations yourself, and so on.

Then, just when you felt very interested in the job and really wanted to get involved—at the point when you were thinking you could start working tomorrow—

she started telling you that you needed to take promotional photos, and that you had to have promotional photos before you could get work.

For one set of promotional photos, one outfit costs $5,000.

Two outfits cost $7,000.

Three outfits cost $9,000.

Then she showed you a bunch of image photos other people had taken, showing you handsome men and beautiful women.

At this point, I started feeling that something was strange. The photo fee was simply far too expensive. Even Korean-style ID photos don’t cost this much, and there’s no need to pay extra for retouching either.

Even if you took photos two or three times, it wouldn’t cost this much.

So I tentatively told her that I might not want to take the photos right away.

She immediately changed her attitude.

Very quickly. She even put away all the written materials, looking as though she was about to get off work.

Then she asked me how long I wanted to wait before taking them—two years or three years?

That sounded extremely sarcastic; you could tell she was already very unhappy.

Because she had spent half an hour telling me all this, hoping to see whether she could make a sale.

She said the company and the actors split the earnings 40/60. I thought maybe she could take a 60/40 cut from this deal or something.

Then she started looking for a way to back out,

trying to end the conversation.

After that, she even said things like, “So you don’t really want to do this job,” and started emotionally manipulating me.

Once the conversation reaches this kind of emotional manipulation, there’s more than a 90% chance something is fishy.

It’s not that I’m particularly smart; I had been scammed before.

The previous company was more sophisticated: they asked you to pay a deposit.

But maybe they had also found a loophole by calling it a deposit; otherwise, they might have tried to collect a guarantee from me too.

Conclusion:

Although this woman spent a lot of time acting at the beginning,

and taught me a lot about acting,

she never expected her own acting to fall apart first.

When I saw the thick stack of A4 sheets she had put away on her desk—enough to make a whole bundle—

I knew that many people must have been scammed before me.

But I was also curious: what proportion of the people inside had actually been deceived by her?

And because she stopped wanting to act halfway through and started getting lazy,

when she explained the price of the photos, she showed me information written on someone else’s résumé.

I saw what was probably the résumé of an earlier victim.

Education: only attended high school, but dropped out.

And it was the kind of dropout that had happened recently.

It was truly heartbreaking.

It turns out that eating human flesh with a knife and fork doesn’t necessarily happen in politics,

nor does it require being in a truly powerful position.

In these unseen corners of society, the same thing is happening every day.

I suppose it was because I had recently watched a few mountain-island monkeys recommended by YouTube

that I ended up encountering something similar.

Afterword:

Although I wasted an hour and had to hold my pee the entire time,

the woman said the restroom was broken and couldn’t be used.

Taking an introductory acting lesson with her here was actually quite interesting and worthwhile, haha.