Chapter 63: She Started Getting Injections at Only 32?

Two hours later.

The auditionees, including Yuanyuan and Qinqin, had already left. Li Wenyu was talking with Qin Lan in the guest room.

Qin Lan would be playing the female second lead in My Love from the Star—the female protagonist's childhood friend and best buddy. She starts out as a supporting character and later turns into a villain who tries to suppress the heroine.

The fourth female lead role was given to Gao Yuanyuan.

Big Beauty Yuan wasn't the absolute best at acting, and when the others failed their auditions for the second female lead, they felt the fourth female lead seemed acceptable enough—until they heard they needed to prepare for four to five months.

In 2002, Hu Jing had already starred in four television series, including her own headlining female-lead projects.

She was never going to give up a lead role to waste half a year on a fourth female lead.

Big Beauty Yuan, however, was interested and accepted.

Her acting skills were more than enough for a television drama's fourth female lead; one could just look at Zhou Zhiruo in The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber as a reference!

Her stunning beauty was also more than sufficient. She gets involved in a serial killer case orchestrated by the villains and ends up murdered, with the blame cunningly shifted onto the female protagonist.

This causes the superstar heroine's career to collapse, driving her nearly to bankruptcy.

With her personal script in hand, Big Beauty Yuan headed back to prepare and wait for filming to start.

Li Wenyu took a sip of tea and smiled, "Qin Lan, your acting is still quite green. Compared to Jiang Qinqin or Gao Yuanyuan, you're a bit lacking, but I see a certain spiritual spark in you."

"Sign with the company now, and we'll assign you a dedicated acting coach. Filming starts in four months. I expect you to deliver a good performance. If it really doesn't work out, I'll have no choice but to replace you at the last minute."

"Rest assured, though, even if you lose the second female lead role in Star, signing with the company means we will still strive to secure and arrange other work for you. The company has that kind of capability—as long as your acting keeps up."

He chose Qin Lan for the second female lead instead of Big Beauty Yuan, Zeng Li, or Yan Danchen for a specific reason: Qin Lan hadn't signed with any agency yet, and he had just established his own company.

Qin Lan had only ever played Wu Zetian in The Love Story of the Tang Dynasty, and the show's reception after airing was just so-so.

It wouldn't be until next year's Princess Returning My Pearl III that she would start making a small splash, and even in that show, her acting was only passable.

Fan Bingbing smiled and gave an example, "Director Li's two junior schoolmates are currently playing the female lead and second lead in Andy Lau's new movie. You know about The Tuner, right? There are also junior actors signed with our company playing supporting roles in it."

There really wasn't any need to say much more.

Qin Lan expressed her excitement gratefully, "Thank you, Boss and Boss's wife! I'll sign!"

She was twenty-three years old this year, and her role in The Love Story of the Tang Dynasty was basically an extra. Her previous project had gotten caught up in a legal controversy...

Landing a major project and a golden opportunity from a top director like Li Wenyu was practically like having a golden leg drop straight from the heavens.

She wasn't formally trained from a professional acting academy; she had graduated from Shenyang University of Technology. Being able to pass the entrance exams for a tier-one university in the late nineties meant she certainly wasn't stupid.

Li Wenyu nodded, "You'll stay at this hotel today. I'll have a room opened for you shortly, and your contract and one-on-one acting coach will arrive over the next couple of days."

"We'll also arrange a proper dormitory for you, rent an apartment..."

Qin Lan and her coach could be arranged to live in the same place as Jiang Shuying and Miao Pu.

That way, they could interact and learn from each other more.

He made a phone call, instructing the assistant waiting at the hotel to open a room, scout out a rental apartment genuinely suited for Qin Lan and her coach, and take Qin Lan along with them.

Fan Bingbing said quietly, "A twenty-three-year-old pretty girl, with a face full of collagen, acting as the childhood best friend to Kelly Lin? The age gap..."

Li Wenyu was somewhat speechless.

He fell silent for a few dozen seconds, then offered an awkward laugh, "Don't be startled the next time you see Sister Lin. She had some kind of epiphany and went to get beauty injections. Her looks and age appearance have regressed back to her late twenties."

Sister Lin was thirty-two. Because she was always well-fed, deeply cared for, and used top-tier facial masks abundantly, her physical state was just like the one in Dark Horse Prince.

After discovering this, Kelly Lin had also been rather suspicious.

Li Wenyu had placated her using natural science explanations about good moods, plenty of physical exercise, working out, self-discipline, and so on.

Once hoodwinked by this, even if Kelly Lin felt a bit sorry for Sister Gang, she grew increasingly fond of making impromptu visits.

This was far better than those hundred-thousand-yen beauty injections from island nations.

She really didn't do that much outdoor sports!!

Was he now supposed to hoodwink Fan Bingbing into getting island technological injections?

Better to stall and fool around for a few years. The fewer people who knew, the better. Otherwise, given Fan Bingbing's somewhat limited exposure, what if she accidentally let something slip?

Once the outside world started getting suspicious, he would only have to tell even more lies to cover up a single white lie.

Fan Bingbing was utterly shocked. "My god, she started getting injections at just thirty-two?"

Anyway, Fan Bingbing had no aesthetic medicine needs for the next thirty years!

She was already an ageless beauty queen herself.

Li Wenyu coughed lightly, "Trust in science. By the way, since Star is a major production, just the looks of the male and female leads and supporting cast alone will keep countless viewers hooked."

"I plan to shoot it on film cameras. I'm not going to sweat that bit of cost anymore. Product placements alone will recoup the entire budget, including the film stock costs."

Kelly Lin + Qin Lan + Gao Yuanyuan + Li Bingbing + Yang Mi + Huang Xiaoming + Deng Chao + Yan Kuan + Hu Ge + Ren Quan—avoiding any cringeworthy visual styles.

Based on the original makeup and styling of Star, it was guaranteed to be a massive idol hit.

Li Bingbing would make a free cameo appearance as the female lead's high school classmate and friend, while Ren Quan would make a free cameo as the female lead's younger brother.

Hu Ge was still under evaluation, but signing him over the summer to play the younger brother of the second female lead would be a breeze.

At this stage, mainland television dramas were basically shot using magnetic tape videocassettes. The cost was low and cheap, but the downside was that the more a tape was played, the blurrier the video quality became.

Even with the explosion of various high-definition restoration technologies in the 2020s, there was simply no way to use technology to restore television dramas shot on magnetic tape.

Once 4K high-definition truly took over the market, no matter how classic an old television drama was, it would still be trapped in a small, blurry picture format!

Film cameras were entirely different. Take, for example, the 1980 film *Job Hunter* starring Leslie Cheung and Danny Chan. After high-definition restoration, both the image quality and the video resolution could match the high-definition viewing experience of *Wolf Warrior 2* or *The Wandering Earth*, films made nearly forty years later.

That featured a twenty-five-year-old Leslie Cheung on screen.

Fan Bingbing pondered for a few seconds, "Since the actors are preparing for so long, and you're the master director, you can tinker with it however you like. By the way, won't the outside world be curious about that older woman looking young again?"

Li Wenyu laughed in amusement, "We'll just say that Kelly Lin naturally possesses the genetic trait of an ageless beauty, and after stepping out of the shadows of a heartbreak and taking good care of herself, she bounced right back..."

The world was never short of various promotional gimmicks surrounding ageless beauties.

Why did Kelly Lin have that slightly weathered, mature beauty vibe after breaking through thirty last year? It hadn't been that obvious to begin with, and it could easily be chalked up to her emotional state.

She and "Electric Fan" Big Liu had broken up and made up eleven times, and she had even gone through a phase between being "more than friends, not quite lovers" with Leon Lai.

For several years in the nineties, Kelly Lin felt that the handsome Leon Lai was quite nice, collaborating with him on Mandarin promotion programs and working together across multiple film and television projects.

Without Leon Lai needing to gift houses and jewelry the way Electric Fan Big Liu did, she might have actually settled down with him.

The problem was that Kelly Lin didn't want to chase after a man, and her mindset also felt that the Heavenly King Leon's family fortune wasn't quite super-tycoon level enough—it fell just a bit short of her benchmark for marrying into elite wealth.

As for Heavenly King Leon, he certainly never lacked beautiful women chasing after him, whether it was Maggie Shiu, Shu Qi (who pursued him persistently from 1998 to 2004), or various other rumored partners.

Her relationship with Leon Lai ended up surpassing that of ordinary good friends, but it never evolved into romance, lasting all the way into the first and second decades of the twenty-first century.

Ah Xin wasn't smooth-sailing in her romance, but her friendship with Leon Lai was genuinely solid.

Before transferring her management contract, Ah Xin had been signed to Leon Lai's company. When she said she wanted to jump ship to follow Li Wenyu, Heavenly King Leon didn't say a single extra word and let her go. Breach of contract penalties? Money talk? No one even brought it up.

Externally, Kelly Lin claimed she had been dating a model five years younger than her. That was meant to provoke Electric Fan Big Liu—something along the lines of "If you don't marry me, I'll use your money to keep a young toy boy."

That trick didn't work on Big Liu, but she would later use Big Liu's name to scare Young Master Xu, prompting Young Master Xu to quickly marry her and bring her home.

These were the things Kelly Lin spilled during her impromptu visits while eating spicy hot pot marathons.

In the original timeline, starting in 2003, Ah Xin still contacted and negotiated with two mainland tycoons, but similarly feeling that their net worth fell far short of Big Liu's and the Xu family's, and lacking deep-rooted financial standing, she quickly dumped them.

Fan Bingbing dizzily processed this for a few seconds, then nodded excitedly, "Then you'd better take good care of my mental state, too! Who knows, maybe ten years from now I won't have aged a single bit either."