Chapter Three
Back then
Tristan was wearing a groove in the hardwood when Brad finally got to his point.
“You’re too clean-cut for the Alan role.” Brad’s voice had taken on the careful flatness of a man delivering a terminal diagnosis. “They wanted gritty, not pretty. Those were the man’s words, Tris. Not mine.”
Tristan stopped pacing and stared at the ceiling of his Kensington flat.
He’d been refreshing his inbox every forty minutes for two weeks.
He’d watched the Dark Waters pilot four times, studied the Alan breakdown scene until he knew every single beat he wanted to hit, and put himself on tape doing an East London accent so gritty he sounded like he’d gargled gravel.
But it had all been for nothing. Too pretty. The same two words had followed him out of every casting room since he’d turned twenty.
“I can grow a beard,” he said.
The pause on the other end was so long that Tristan checked the screen to make sure the call was still connected.
“You think so?” Brad asked. His own thoughts on that were clear from the audible stress on the word ‘think’.
“Fuck you, Brad.”
His irritation had no bite behind it because Brad was right, and they both knew it.
Tristan had tried to scruff up once, during a three-week hiatus between press tours, and the result had come in patchy and thin, clustering around his chin in irregular tufts that made him look less gritty leading man and more recovering from a weekend hangover.
He’d shaved it off on day nine and never mentioned it again.
“Listen,” Brad said, clearing his throat.
“I know you’re not going to want to hear this, but Ridgemont just greenlit Summer Rules.
Coming-of-age ensemble, big studio, theatrical release.
There’s a supporting role. Older brother to the lead, protective, kind of the emotional anchor of the second act. You’d be perfect for it.”
Tristan drifted to the window. Below him, the Kensington street was quiet, expensive, and completely indifferent to his plummeting career trajectory.
“No.” He pressed his forehead against the glass. “Fuck no, Brad. I wouldn’t even be sixth on the call sheet for that. I’m not doing another tween movie. I need something different. Something rom-com, or dark, or period. Something where I’m not playing a fucking teenager.”
“You don’t have the face for a rom-com lead,” Brad said bluntly.
“Your face and body can’t do dark; not the kind they’re casting right now where they’re basically after Mr Olympians, but accessible.
And you wouldn’t bring an audience big enough to justify the spend for your usual rate.
Period drama, maybe. Let me see what I can rustle up. ”
The line went dead. Tristan stood at the window with his mobile pressed against his thigh and watched a woman walk a pair of identical dachshunds past his building, their leads tangled, their little legs working in unison.
He was twenty-four, and it looked like he’d peaked.
He didn’t throw his mobile. He wanted to. The trajectory was right there, a clean arc from his hand to the wall. But the screen was already cracked from a previous moment of editorial feedback, and if he wasn’t booking jobs, he couldn’t afford to keep replacing mobiles.
Instead he dropped onto the sofa, reached for his Moleskine, and uncapped a pen with his teeth.
Tristan liked lists. They took the ambient hum of his career anxiety and let him reduce it to bullet points he could cross out and reorder.
He’d been keeping a version of this particular list since his twentieth birthday, updating it every time a door closed in his face.
The pages were getting uncomfortably crowded.
He wrote: OPTIONS (REVISED) and underlined it twice.
1. Get big.
He’d thought about this before. The leading men booking the roles he wanted were all built like they’d been assembled in a facility: wide shoulders, cut jaws, arms that required a personal trainer, a nutritionist, and a protein intake that would leave any normal person dangerously constipated.
Tristan weighed a hundred and forty pounds in wet denim.
He could roid up. Half the industry was doing exactly that, cycling on and off between projects.
But he’d always been naturally slender. His frame wouldn’t carry it convincingly, and the face sitting on top of whatever body he built would still be that of a kid who’d once talked to a CGI rabbit on the Disney Channel.
He crossed it out.
2. Date someone unhinged.
There was a version of this that worked.
A public relationship with someone so far outside the expected lane that the press couldn’t ignore it.
An OnlyFans creator, a reality star, a sugar mama twice his age with a yacht and an Instagram following measured in the millions.
The coverage would reframe him as a man with appetites.
The problem was that the reframing only worked if you controlled the narrative, and Tristan had watched enough of his contemporaries try this move to know that the narrative had a habit of eating you alive.
The tabloids wrote the story that sold papers, and a twenty-four-year-old former Disney star dating someone controversial wouldn’t read as future leading man makes bold romantic choice.
It would read as former child actor spiralling, and then his Google results would be unsalvageable for a decade.
He crossed that out too.
3. Breakdown.
He wrote it and then just sat there and stared at it, written out bleakly on the page.
He could manufacture a controlled public mental health crisis.
Go to rehab, then make a tearful show of accountability, and a chest-beating appearance on a podcast with at least fourteen million subscribers.
Go for the sympathy play. It had worked for people.
It had relaunched entire careers on the back of a single interview where someone cried at the right moment and said the right things about growth, gratitude, and the importance of seeing life as a ‘journey’.
But Tristan’s pen hovered over the word and didn’t move, because the truth sitting underneath the strategy was that he wasn’t sure how much of a public Tristan Whitlock breakdown would be a ‘performance’.
His sleep was a disaster. He refreshed his notifications with a frequency that his therapist would have classified as compulsive.
Some mornings the gap between I’m having a hard time and I’m not okay felt paper-thin, and staging a breakdown for column inches when the real thing was already circling the perimeter was a decision he wouldn’t come back from.
He drew a line through it so hard the pen tore the paper.
4. Epic romance.
He stared at the words and turned the pen between his fingers, clicking the cap against his front teeth.
He could try for a proper relationship, a visible, strategically impeccable romance with someone whose public profile would recast him by proximity. Someone so far above his current billing that association with her alone would shift the conversation.
He needed someone who made him look like a leading man, even if no casting director would back him as one.
Tristan stopped fiddling with his pen, because he had the perfect option.
Princess Caroline of the United Kingdom.
He’d sat next to her at the Hargreaves dinner.
She’d laughed at two of his jokes, touched his arm once, and invited him to accompany her to a school visit, where they’d spent most of the time chatting.
Caroline had given him a door, and Tristan hadn’t built the career he had by leaving openings like those unexplored.
He circled number four, twice, and closed his notebook.
? ? ?
Before committing to his European pivot, Tristan had done his homework, a natural result of growing up entrenched in an industry that ran on focus groups, test screenings, and the precise science of making strangers like you.
If he was going to operate in a British market, he needed to understand the British consumer.
His mother, rest her soul, had been his primary source material for British context for twenty-two years, and the data set was robust. Janet Whitlock, née Fanshawe, liked milky tea, and telling strangers on public transport that their children were misbehaving.
She distrusted enthusiasm, open displays of wealth, and people who smiled too much, which she felt indicated either untreated mania or a career in something disreputable like real estate or car sales.
The common thread, as far as Tristan could identify one, was this: the British respected people who didn’t take themselves too seriously. Self-deprecation was a national sport, and the better you were at it, the more they trusted you.
So he started sending Caroline videos.
The first one was forty seconds long. He filmed himself in his kitchen, staring into an open fridge that contained half a jar of pesto, a block of halloumi past its sell-by, and a bag of pre-cut cauliflower florets.
He held the cauliflower up to the camera with both hands.
Day in the Life of a Non-Working Actor: Lunch Edition.
The question is not whether cauliflower fritters are sad.
The question is how sad? Scale of one to ten. Be honest.
She replied with a single message: Solid seven. The halloumi saves it from an eight.
The second video was him in Hyde Park, crouching beside a stranger’s cockapoo, scratching vigorously behind its ears. Day in the Life: 2pm meeting. Very productive. Kevin and I have agreed on a joint statement around squirrels.
The third was a clip of his television screen playing Twilight, Edward Cullen glowering through a biology class, while Tristan practised the same expression in a small rectangle of front-facing camera in the corner.
He held the look for five seconds, then broke.
Prepping for my audition as Crime Victim #3.
The brief says “haunted” but I think they’d settle for “mildly constipated”. Robert Pattinson has this down.
Caroline replied to each one within the hour. She sent laughing emojis sparingly. The British distrust of enthusiasm extended, apparently, to digital communication. Her replies got longer, and on two occasions, included follow-up questions.
He knew he’d hit the right frequency when she sent one back.
The video was shaky, filmed on a mobile.
Caroline was standing on a rocky shoreline somewhere grey and wind-blasted, her hair whipping across her face, holding a freshly gutted fish by the tail.
She wore wellies and an enormous waxed jacket, her hands covered in blood and scales.
Day in the Life of a Princess: Lunch Edition, the caption read. The fish swung gently in the wind.
The camera panned to a campfire, where the fish was placed on a makeshift grill over the flames.
Then it caught the background where there was a loose circle of people sitting on rocks and camp chairs, bundled against the cold.
Tristan recognised the King first, in a dark green jacket, his hands wrapped around a tin mug.
Beside him, a slight blond man Tristan didn’t know, and beside him, unmistakably, Lex Murphy, the heavyweight boxer, eating a roast potato out of a foil wrapper.
Tristan watched it twice, then a third time. He paused on the frame with the King and studied the composition, the small group arranged around him with the unselfconscious proximity of people who’d known each other for years.
That was the inner circle, and Caroline had just given him a peek inside it.