His agent
In person, Seb doesn’t look like his picture.
Perhaps it’s because the headshot, printed out on glossy paper and lying on the table between them, is black and white.
It makes his dark eyebrows look darker, his irises even more black.
Perhaps it’s because, since the photo was taken, he’s grown a bit of facial hair.
He’s obviously handsome. Marlon Brando with a hipster beard, as Richard’s assistant likes to say.
Seb has all the accoutrements of an effortlessly cool person, the black denim jacket and the black coffee and the black wraparound headphones.
Yet in the flesh, he wears his intensity a little awkwardly.
It’s like he knows that people are always looking at him, and he’s uncomfortable about that fact.
It’s a simple question, then. Why invite people to look?
‘Why do you want to be an actor?’ Richard asks.
A clock is ticking. On the other side of a glass table in a glass-walled meeting room in a Soho office made almost entirely of glass, Seb struggles with the simplest of questions.
‘Well,’ he says, with an uncomfortable cough. ‘It was suggested—’
‘You don’t want to be an actor?’
‘I never really planned any of this.’
‘But you wanted to be a model,’ Richard says. ‘Or didn’t you?’
Seb makes a face.
‘It’s not a test.’
‘I just want to earn rent,’ Seb says, with an apologetic smile. ‘And to put his food on the table.’
He’s referring, Richard assumes, to the dog in his lap, staring goggly-eyed and snaggle-toothed across the space between them.
‘You know they don’t actually allow—’ Richard begins, but the dog’s glare stops him. ‘Never mind. What do you want, Seb? And money isn’t a good enough answer.’
Seb rubs the back of his neck. He speaks almost apologetically. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Then what do you like?’ Richard says. ‘What makes you happy?’
Seb thinks for a moment. He clasps his hands together, the tattoos on his wrists just about visible.
‘Music,’ Seb says. ‘Music makes me happy.’
Richard knows, of course, that Seb was in a band.
It was Richard’s friend who’d first scouted him at a gig in god knows where, then shepherded him into a series of semi-successful campaigns in which he smouldered under a spritz of Paco Rabanne aftershave or scowled in a pair of DKNY jeans.
His crowning moment: a Lynx Dark Temptation ad that turned him into a Michelangelo’s David made of chocolate.
But when they’d tried to put Seb on a catwalk, he’d been wooden, shambling like Frankenstein’s monster, far too self-conscious for his own good.
He works in a bar nowadays. But he’s still blessed with strong cheekbones and a six-and-a-bit-foot frame, which is how he first ended up here, opposite Richard, last year.
They’ve had a good few auditions since then, a fair few near-misses.
Seb is still untested as an actor, but who cares?
It’s Richard’s job to see something, and he sees it here.
That intensity. Those dark and brooding eyes.
Find Seb Bonami the right role, lots of close-ups and minimal lines, and you might just make him a megastar.
Richard leans back in his chair. ‘Shall I tell you what I think?’
Seb looks sceptical. ‘Go for it.’
‘I think that this isn’t you,’ Richard says, waving one well-manicured hand over the glossy headshot. ‘You think it feels inauthentic. You think you’re above such things.’
‘I wouldn’t say “above”,’ Seb says.
‘Alright,’ Richard says. ‘Outside of 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 you get 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 most ruthless 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.’