‘I wouldn’t say “above”,’ Seb says.
‘Alright,’ Richard says. ‘Outsideof such things. You’re not a model, not really. And you’re not an actor, not in the red-carpet, press-junket sense. I don’t think you want the glitz and the glamour. But you do want something. Because you’re here. And because you lean in to being reluctant and distant and, let’s face it, a little bit difficult, knowing those things are the reason that people want to put you in front of a camera.’
Seb nods slowly. ‘That doesn’t help me work out what I want.’
Richard throws his hands up. ‘I don’t have a clue what you want,’ he says. ‘But I assume it’s that same feeling you get from your music. An escape. A sense of being part of something beautiful.’ Richard leans back in his chair, sizes Seb up. ‘Maybe it is money. Maybe it’s none of the above. Maybe you’ll never know what you want. But whatever it is, I’m going to help youget it. Because I like you. And because, more importantly, I get a sense that directors like you, too.’
When the meeting is over, when they’ve discussed auditions and callbacks, cold calls with casting directors and friends who owe Richard a favour, Richard walks Seb back down to reception. The lobby is open, a space for meeting and greeting and being spotted. Richard dresses to be seen, smartly tailored suit and thick-framed glasses, hair so finely shaped at the sides that it looks like he has it cut every morning. Seb, on the other hand, seems to find being seen a struggle. There’s something like nausea on his face at the stir he causes among those waiting, the way they all look up to watch him go. It’s only when he’s on the other side of the wide glass windows, when he’s buttoned up his denim jacket and donned his big black headphones, when it’s just him and his dog in the ice-cold air of a bright January morning, that Seb will finally seem to relax. Then, after a moment, he’ll be gone, swallowed up by Golden Square. Richard stares out for a moment over the piazza the agency calls home. The icy cars and the closely huddled tourists look like they’re frozen in time. He checks his Omega watch, though he knows he’ll have left the perfect gap until his next meeting. When he looks up, it’s just like he predicted. Beneath a faceless statue and leafless trees, his next client arrives.
Agents are a bit like parents. They’re not supposed to have favourites. And yet, if Richard were to choose one person in whom to invest his time, it wouldn’t be Seb. It would be the young man who’s just appeared on the street outside. A proper thesp, RADA-trained, with a hard-working hunger that’s head and shoulders above that possessed by even Richard’s mostruthless colleagues. Yes, Jacob is a redhead. But it’s good to have a unique offering, and they can call him ‘strawberry blond’ on his comp card. What matters is raw talent, and this young man has it in droves. Even now, out there with a girl Richard doesn’t recognise, Jacob moves like a ballet dancer, with the grace of someone for whom the whole world is a stage. It’s like watching a piece of drama, Jacob and this small, furious blonde, their voices presumably raised but muffled to mute in here. It’s like Jacob is always performing, even when the audience isn’t there. The girl shakes her head, tilts her chin upwards, then leaves. Jacob looks after her, runs his fingers slowly through his hair as if weathering a round of applause.
‘Great to see you,’ he says to Richard a moment later, once he’s glided across the road and into the lobby with the composure of someone meant for bigger and better things.
He fixes Richard with those emerald eyes, takes his hand. Richard places his own hand on the outside of Jacob’s, oozing warmth.
‘Thanks for coming,’ Richard says. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Jacob replies, something like anger playing across his face. He smothers it, regains his smile, squeezes Richard’s hand a little bit tighter. ‘I think my girlfriend just broke up with me.’
the reader
‘Thank you for your time,’ says Nico. ‘We’ll be in touch.’
She concludes every audition in exactly the same way, and they’ve already done so many that Lucy is getting good at reading Nico’s tone of voice. The first sentence light and airy, the latter landing like a hammer-blow. If these cadences were swapped around, this guy’s name would be getting a little asterisk, his agent expecting a call. Alas, he seems to have guessed what Lucy already knows. It’s like someone has stuck a pin in him, like he visibly deflates a little with each step towards the already-opening door.
‘Next!’
If you believe film is a fairy-tale business, you’d need only sit for a day at this trestle table in this dimly lit Bloomsbury basement to dispel all your illusions. Minimal introductions. No small talk. The script they’ve been given does the talking. It will speak for itself a hundred times today, from a hundred different mouths in a hundred different hopeful faces. It’s a production line, a factory farm, the way they shepherd in each young man and give him two minutes to totter in front of them before taking a bolt-gun to his hopes and dreams. Still, thedoor never stops opening, and the optimistic men never stop coming. There are some glass-half-empty men, too. Confident men and quietly confident men; tall men and short men and men who lied about their heights in their submissions; men with impenetrable accents, men putting on impenetrable accents; blandly handsome men with arms like tree trunks and wooden demeanours; strange-looking skinny men with interesting faces that promise presence and sometimes deliver. Men who won’t get another audition. Men who should never get another audition. And a small handful of men who might.
The latest is one of the ones who lied about his height, and he puffs himself up as large as he can before he launches with admirable melodrama into the allotted monologue. Nico, with her immaculate braids and her withering eye, is the casting director. This is her operation, and she’s wielding her pen like a pickaxe. The film’s director, a Swede who hasn’t cracked a smile all morning, sits to her side. On his other side is Agathe, the Swede’s long-suffering producer, Nico’s new-ish collaborator and Lucy’s frankly formidable boss. Rounding out the table is Clara, the other assistant at the production company. She and Lucy split the load, usually, of setting meetings and answering emails and doing coffee runs for entire writers’ rooms. So, Clara is the other reader, and the pair of them take it in turns to feed lines to hopefuls so neither of them goes home without a voice.
‘I’ll start you off,’ says Clara, once the actor has caught his breath from his monologue. ‘How could you?’ she says, her voice snapping so suddenly into scripted anger that the actor is momentarily taken aback. ‘I thought I told you never to step through this door again.’
After a moment, he recovers himself, and the actor and Clara work their way through the requisite scene. Agathe nods slightly throughout. Nico, almost imperceptibly, shakes her head. He isn’t the one. Clara is having to do all the work. She has only been at the company for a few months, but she’s hit the ground running. At first she’d seemed like a moody Margot Tenenbaum, all sharp cheekbones and smudged eyeliner, but it only took one conversation about Scandinavian cinema for Clara to out herself as a nerd who can get so breathless talking about her favourite films that she needs to be put in time out. Even more impressive is her ability to leave this frenetic energy at the door. To focus like a laser, when the work requires it. You’d think she’d be finding it difficult, acting out a break-up over and over with a string of total strangers to an audience of industry professionals. After all, it’s not that long ago that she broke up with her own boyfriend.
Clara had told Lucy that Jacob was more like a collaborator, that they’d once shared a single-minded, near-sociopathic focus on bettering themselves for the big lives they had planned. They had spent their uni years fucking and fighting and rolling out of bed to film self-tapes and short films, auditions for the kind of people they wanted to become. It was only in the real world that they began to fall apart. They weren’t even in competition, but outside their student bubble, things were more spiteful. Jacob shot down Clara’s suggestions, screwed up her drawings, made fun of her ideas in front of their friends. Clara resented any acting jobs Jacob did get, made sure to remind him his roles were minor. When she told Jacob that she’d got an actual job in actual film production, he’d run the whole gamut ofemotions. Annoyed she hadn’t told him she’d applied, then amused that she’d sold out, then ultimately pleased that she was finally putting her silly little directorial ambitions aside. The latter comment had been the final nail in the coffin. Clara had said that an actor like him should be better at spotting a faked orgasm. Then she’d left for good.
‘Good riddance,’ said Lucy, baffled at this barrage of personal information from a colleague she’d only known for two weeks.
‘There’ll be more like him,’ Agathe had said, because she loves gossip, and because they’d been conducting the conversation right outside her office, loud enough for her to hear.
Lucy didn’t say that she knew exactly who Jacob was, that he was already sleeping his way through several members of Lucy’s own friendship group. Agathe didn’t say that she knew him, too, and was currently considering him for a role in another film co-produced by her.
‘Thank you for your time,’ Nico says, as the audition limps to a close. ‘We’ll be in touch.’
Nico says that casting is like a love story. Whatever the role, you’re asking an audience to fall in love with this person. The best villains are the ones you love to hate, and the best love interests are the ones you hate to love. And while the role they’re casting now is little more than a brooding love interest for a secondary character, you only hire Nico if you want to find the one.
Could this be him? As the next contender ducks into the room and walks slowly towards the table, it’s already easy to imagine him mopping the sweat from his brow with ahandkerchief and swinging at wheat with a scythe, stooping under the doorjamb of a cottage too small for the dreams he’d once had. Nico looks straight to his name, taps against it with her pen. Agathe smiles brightly, and even the Swede sits up a little in his chair.
Next to Lucy, Clara stiffens. A gasp escapes from her small mouth.
‘Seb Bonami,’ he says, by way of introduction. ‘Reading for the part of Erasmus Weir.’
His voice is deep. He’s tall, broad-shouldered, with wavy hair and a patchwork of tattoos. A smile that seems a little more like a grimace summons itself in his short, dark beard. His volcanic eyes pass along the line of his assembled audience. When his gaze settles on Clara, any hint of a smile vanishes.
Lucy glances at Clara. She’s looking down at her own copy of the script, cheeks reddening. There is a long and unnerving silence, as if this Seb is so intense that the entire room needs an extra moment to take him in.
‘When you’re ready,’ Nico says, encouragingly. Lucy can already see the asterisk being marked, the name being underlined.
