He gives me a surprised face. If he’s surprised, I’m flabbergasted.
“You didn’t know?” he asks. “I thought you knew. I thought that’s why you told me all that stuff about your play.”
He stares at me as we both try to understand. Then he says, “When you asked me about being an actor that time in the car park, I thought you recognised me.”
My eyes search all over his face, trying to work out who he might be. It’s hard to tell with all the hair and the beard hiding more of his features.
As if to make it worse, he reaches up and releases his man bun. He shakes his hair loose and rubs his fingers through it to make it bushy. “Does this help?” He looks at me expecting me to recognise him.
“Sorry, I have no idea.”
“Really?” Then his eyes gleam and he laughs. “That’s putmein my place. Serves me right for being arrogant.”
Is he supposed to be famous?
“Well?” I wait for him to enlighten me. “Put me out of my misery.”
“I’m inClan. I play Ursus.”
Clan!
CLAN!I shout inside my head as everything shuffles around in my brain to recalibrate my impression of him. “OMG, Raff, that’s only the biggest series on television.”
He shakes his head still laughing. “No, it isn’t. If it were, you’d have been watching it.”
If he’s offended, there’s no sign of it.
“Only because I’m not into that high fantasy trend, but I’ve heard ofClan. Who hasn’t? They must be on season four now.”
“About to film season five,” he agrees.
Oh my God! All, the time he’s been this quiet guy who fixes chairs and helps out, being modest and standing in the background when in fact he’s a star. Suddenly my tirade the other night fills me with embarrassment. Me with my tiny career. Pretty girl in the crowd, second blonde from the left, third girl in a miniskirt. Upset about not getting to playAladdinin some nameless panto.
Another man would have laughed at me..
For the rest of the afternoon, I pepper him with questions. Ursus is a bear-brother, a man with a ‘connection’ to a bear, hence the bushy hair.
“But don’t they have wigs and fake bears?”
“Obvs.” The urban shorthand sounds odd from this softly spoken Welshman. It’s a clue to his other life. A side of him I know nothing about.
“Thing is, I’m allergic to the glue stuff.” He runs a hand over his beard. “And the wigs made my scalp too hot. It was easier to grow my own.”
“How long do you film for?” My own filming experience is usually a few days.
“Six to eight weeks, usually. But you know what it’s like. Mostly you’re in make-up for hours then wait around for lighting and stand ins and all the other crew to shift stuff around and line up the equipment. Hours of waiting to film for thirty minutes, if you’re lucky.”
“I thought that was just me because my parts weren’t important.”
He looks at me – and it feels like a great high – then shakes his head. “Everyone. On a film set, the actor comes slightly lowerthan the people who wash the cups. We had a sweepstake going on how many days we got trussed up in all the gear then never got called. It’s just like Russell Crowe said, the pay is good, but they treat you like shit.”
“Treat you like shit, only if you’re lucky. The truth nobody knows when they readHellomagazine.” A part of me wants to reform working conditions for actors. “Why do we put up with it?”
“Because we love acting.” And a minute later, he throws his head back and laughs. “We must love it like crazy to put up with all that.”
I’ve been temporarily distracted from the news he’s leaving just after Christmas. It’s not until we’ve bought all the supplies and returned to Kendric House that I remember.
“Forgive my ignorance but where is Mauritania?”
