Chapter 3
Hunter
‘Morning, Bernard,’ she says. ‘Congratulations on your engagement.’
Maybe I should be more open-minded. All my current problems would be solved if it was me who was getting married to Bernard.
My visa runs out in exactly two weeks. And no, I’m not being serious, but there are times when I’ve thought that finding a husband would be easier than my current plan of trying to land a job in my chosen discipline.
I’m an actor – that famously over-subscribed, under-paid profession.
I’m not sure why I thought I could just arrive in a foreign city and launch a career here.
I’m not even supposed to be auditioning.
Technically, my visa doesn’t permit it, but I figured I’d move here and try anyway.
I’ve been auditioning for five and a half months, and I haven’t had any luck.
But maybe that’s about to change.
As I arrive at my tube stop, I try to manifest a successful audition.
Positive thinking, right? Not my forte, but I’ve prepared for this audition meticulously.
I’ve thought about the character from every angle, left no stone unturned.
By all logic, I should be walking in with the quiet confidence of a man who knows what he’s doing.
But then my brain starts offering counterpoints.
What if the director doesn’t like my face?
What if the producer once got dumped by someone who wears the same aftershave as me?
What if the casting director decides that my posture is too stiff, too jaunty, too proud?
Unfortunately for the optimists, casting directors are always looking for a reason to say no.
Walking through the doors of the casting rooms in Soho, I feel sick to my stomach.
Every actor I know has had some sort of traumatic experience on these premises.
Auditions are typically preceded in the worst way possible: you sit in a corridor with a load of other actors who look almost exactly like you only slightly more handsome.
The role I’m going for today is gender-blind, which means I will avoid my usual doppelg?ngers, but also means that anyone with a pulse might be my competition.
After I’ve been sitting for a few minutes, an assistant calls my name and shows me through to the audition room.
The casting director is a woman in her fifties with a pair of sunglasses on her head even though it’s been raining solidly for the past two days.
She doesn’t look up as I enter, just systematically swipes on her phone.
I frown – is she on a dating app? Then I hear the familiar swishing sounds and realise she’s deleting emails.
Her assistant coughs to get her attention. The casting director looks up and takes me in from head to toe. She doesn’t seem very impressed.
‘Shall I do it from the top?’ I ask.
‘Do what?’
‘The scene.’
‘What scene?’
‘I’ve prepared all my scenes.’
The woman frowns. ‘Prepared what? You don’t have any lines.’
Fair point. I’m auditioning to play the cow in Into the Woods – a part so minor that it’s sometimes played by a puppet. Not quite my dream job, but beggars can’t be choosers.
‘I’ve prepared my reactions,’ I say defiantly.
‘Right, well that’s not much good, because I don’t have a script.’
‘What? Why did you call me in?’
She shrugs. ‘To get you in the room and see if you have a sort of bovine quality.’
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. My shoulders tense. ‘And?’
The woman peers at me. ‘Not really, no.’
I feel heat crawling up my neck. ‘Could you not tell that from my photo?’
‘No actually. You’d be surprised.’
An email pings into her inbox. She looks down and swipes immediately. This is humiliating. I prepared for this audition using the Stanislavski technique, and the casting director is more concerned with deleting spam emails.
‘I’d like to run the scene I prepared, if that’s OK,’ I say, my voice cracking.
The woman rolls her eyes but waves for me to proceed.
It’s pretty hard to continue in these circumstances, but I’ve done the work.
I close my eyes, take a deep breath, then go somewhere else in my mind.
I tap into the emotional devastation of being sold by my owner for a handful of beans, my silent knowledge of Jack’s folly.
I communicate all this with the most subtle of facial expressions.
Once I’ve finished, I glance up hopefully.
The woman is looking at her phone. Her assistant nudges her.
‘Can you moo?’ the casting director asks.
‘What?’
‘Moo.’
She moos to demonstrate, as if I wasn’t aware of the concept.
‘The cow is silent!’ I protest. ‘It’s a famously silent role. That’s the beauty of Sondheim’s creation.’
‘Yeah, well our director wants the cow to moo.’
If I’d known, I would have spent days perfecting my moo. But I can hardly refuse. After a few false starts, I offer a plaintive moo that I feel speaks to the cow’s state of mind. They don’t look convinced. The assistant shields her mouth with her hand.
‘What about the back end?’ I hear her mutter to the casting director.
‘I’m not sure he has the gravitas,’ the casting director whispers back.
Great. Now I don’t have the gravitas to play the back end of a cow.
‘Thanks,’ says the casting director. ‘We’ll be in touch.’
I step toward the door, my hand on the door knob, ready to slam it behind me and never look back. Rationally, I know I should walk away. Save myself the humiliation.
But my mouth has a mind of its own.
‘No you won’t,’ I snap, spinning on my heel so my glare meets hers.
She gives me an astonished look. I could still walk away. I don’t have to do this.
‘You never are,’ I continue. ‘I obviously haven’t got the role, and when that happens, I don’t hear back. It’s so disrespectful.’
I’m not sure what I’m doing. I’m burning my bridges, but this was my last shot to stay in the country. Plus, speaking my mind always feels good. The woman is clearly not used to being spoken to like this.
‘Talk about disrespectful!’ she scoffs. ‘Looks like we’ve dodged a bullet. You’d obviously be a nightmare to work with.’
The words land like a blow to my chest. Her comment cuts to a place I never let anyone see. My lip trembles before I can stop it. I swallow hard, but the sting lingers. Desperate to escape this feeling, I turn and walk out. As I leave, I hear her swipe.
‘Bingo!’ she cries. ‘Inbox zero.’
Being an actor was never the plan. Growing up in a small town in Rhode Island, I had nothing in common with the theater kids, who in turn had no interest in a black-hearted loner like me.
Then one day, my mom took me to see a production of Into the Woods, presumably thinking it would be a load of innocent fairy tales.
That show was a revelation. I was only eleven, but the way the Baker’s Wife stood on stage and bared her soul hit me deep within.
I realised that day that theater didn’t have to be about escapism.
It could be a vehicle to express hard emotional truths.
I became determined to speak those truths myself.
It didn’t always work. My high-school drama teacher refused to cast me in Beauty and the Beast because he said my candlestick was too emotionally devastating.
Instead, I started posting my performances on TikTok, where I was in complete control of what roles I played and how I played them.
It was more out of a need to express myself than any kind of career strategy, but after years of posting into the void, I had one of those experiences that people dream about.
My performance of ‘There Are Worse Things I Could Do’ from Grease went viral.
A young director called Rafferty got in touch and said he’d been working on the idea of a gender-flipped production of Grease.
I found out much later that it was my performance that had given him the idea.
He invited me to audition, but the production was off-Broadway and wouldn’t have paid enough for me to live in New York.
Rafferty said I could live with him if I got cast. The day I moved into the East Village apartment bought for him by his parents, I felt like Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl.
I was so young and naive and Rafferty so in command that when he made a move on me less than a week after I moved in, I just sort of went along with it. Before I knew it, we were dating.
Rizzo was the perfect role for me, a character famous for speaking her mind.
I was good – too good. Every review said I was the best thing about the production.
Rafferty got jealous. He couldn’t handle the attention I was getting.
He convinced me I was ruining the show. I was young and in love and desperate to please him.
So when the show transferred to Broadway, I did the one thing I thought would save the relationship. I turned down the role.
Rafferty wasn’t grateful. The Broadway transfer still took over both our lives.
I became his personal assistant, with no time to audition for other parts.
We started to resent each other. When the transfer finally opened, reviews were scathing.
The New York Times even said that the new Rizzo was no match for me.
Rafferty was furious. He blamed me for everything.
That was the night I finally got the courage to leave him.
But the ordeal didn’t end there. Rafferty was mad that I would dare to break up with him, and terrified that my career would eclipse his.
He was also a nepo baby with a lot of powerful friends.
He told the entire Broadway community I was a nightmare to work with.
I have no doubt he was spinning the story to make me look like the villain.
But ever since then, a small part of me has wondered if he was right.
With my reputation ruined in New York, London became my next best option to launch a theater career, a place where I could be myself without having to negotiate someone else’s insecurities – at least, that was the idea.
Even though I didn’t know anyone here, I figured that since I’d had a hit role in America, it wouldn’t be that hard to find an agent.
I was wrong. All the reputable agents lost interest the second they found out I didn’t have the right to work here.
I ended up signing with one who did things a little more unconventionally.
But being with her has its perks. She works from home, and when she found out about my situation, she didn’t just agree to take me on as a client, she invited me to live with her. For free.
I get off the tube and walk to the square that I still can’t believe I get to call home.
There are bicycles with wicker baskets leaning against iron railings, window boxes spilling with herbs, cherry trees in full blossom, and on one corner, a café with a hand-lettered chalkboard and counters crammed with artichokes and olives.
I let myself in and peek my head into the office.
It can’t have been properly tidied in years, stacked high with old scripts, Post-It notes, and theatrical props that include, for some reason, a stuffed kestrel.
At her desk, talking on the phone, is my agent, dressed in a camel jacket with a silk scarf, her silver hair in a sleek bun.
I signal that I’ll come back later, but she motions for me to wait.
‘It’s not my problem,’ she says down the phone. ‘She started it.’
She pauses and listens in distaste.
‘Can’t you finish the scene with CGI?’ she yells. ‘We don’t have time for mediation.’
She hangs up and smiles at me.
‘Is everything OK?’ I ask.
‘Not exactly,’ she says. ‘One of my clients got into a fist fight with Helena Bonham Carter on the set of The Gummy Bears Movie.’
This woman isn’t real, I swear. Doily – yes, my agent’s name is Doily – came into my life like a whirlwind of vintage silk and Chanel No.
5. She’s the founder, owner, and sole employee of London’s most singular acting agency.
She knows seemingly everyone in the business, but has fallen out with all of them, leaving her client list a little more curated.
The last five months have been nothing if not entertaining.
‘How did the audition go?’ Doily asks.
I give her the thumbs down.
‘Oh, Hunter. I’m sorry.’
As I see her expression, I’m hit with a fresh wave of sadness about how today turned out.
I put everything into that audition. I always do.
And Doily has tried her best. The problem is that only the big productions are willing to sponsor visas.
If I didn’t need a visa, Doily could have got me cast in a regional pantomime without lifting a finger.
‘Shall I make you an eggnog?’ asks Doily.
‘No thanks.’
‘How about an episode of Murder, She Wrote?’
‘I’m OK.’
Doily drums her fingers on her desk. ‘Do you want to help me find an entertainment lawyer who is willing to be paid in gummy bears?’
I really don’t deserve this woman. She has always gone the extra mile for me, even if her approach is, shall we say, unique. But ever since what happened with Rafferty, when someone shows up for me, my first instinct is to put a wall up. I give Doily a grateful smile.
‘Thanks. But I want to be on my own.’
I have no desire to go and sit in my room, so I wander back out into the square.
The Victorian terraces curve around a communal garden, a tangled mess of wisteria and banana plants.
I’ve developed a habit of coming out here and sitting on the swing.
I sink into it, letting the ropes creak under my weight.
I’m aware that I live in a beautiful part of London, but even if I wandered to the parts of the city that I like to moan about – the garish candy stores on Oxford Street, the endless chain supermarkets that pop up like a rash, the lines outside random bubble tea shops that have gone viral – it wouldn’t make a difference.
This city has a rhythm that fits me, scrappy and loud and often pessimistic, but stubbornly alive.
I feel at home here. I don’t want to leave.
But I don’t have a choice. It’s not up to me. My acting career has failed to take flight. What I need now is a miracle.