The casting director
Nico doesn’t recognise Shoreditch any more.
Her east London isn’t this one, with its mock speakeasies and its cereal cafés.
The things that change while the real stuff remains, the nail bars and the barber shops and the offies with Western Union signs above the door.
The meeting is at a fancy new restaurant on Hoxton Street, the kind of place that rolls in, turfs out a heritage business, then closes six months later, because that’s what restaurants do.
She studies the list of natural wines, the corresponding list of inflated prices.
Then a tall shadow appears above her, and she rises to meet him.
‘Seb Bonami,’ she says. ‘It’s been a while.’
Seb takes the seat opposite her. His beard is thicker than it used to be, his head covered by a beanie hat.
There are bags beneath his eyes. His face is as serious as ever, but Nico knows that there’s a puppy dog lurking somewhere beneath his standoffish demeanour.
There’s an actual dog lurking beneath the table.
Jasper looks old, his moustache turned almost entirely white.
He lowers himself on creaking legs, lies contentedly at Seb’s feet.
‘This is your old stomping ground, isn’t it?’ Nico says, as the waitress pours her one of those glasses of natural wine.
‘I lived on this very road,’ Seb nods, sipping a pint of Guinness. He frowns, looks towards the bifold doors. ‘Different, isn’t it?’
Nico laughs. ‘You’re such a hipster,’ she says. ‘I grew up here. You just passed through.’
‘I guess I don’t like change,’ Seb says.
‘We need to get you on to one of those American hospital dramas.’ She takes a sip of wine. ‘You know. Twenty seasons. No plot.’
‘Shit,’ says Seb, rubbing his brow. ‘You’re already consigning me to the scrapheap.’
Nico is in the business of perfect matches.
She spends her life sifting through endless self-tapes from a deluge of identical-looking actors, sitting at the back of auditoriums watching obscure am-dram productions and interminable student drama showcases.
For Nico, perfection looks like chemistry, two leads sparking with such ferocity that they can stun a packed theatre into silence.
Or a seemingly unremarkable remark in a five-star review from a discerning movie critic: ‘This role couldn’t have been played by anyone else.
’ That had been Seb, in that first film.
Nico had talked a big game when they’d met, but she was still a relative rookie in the casting industry.
Still feeling the need to prove to all her old, white, male colleagues that she wasn’t a diversity hire – those same colleagues who didn’t mind the colour of her skin when they were sexually harassing her as equitably as they did all the other juniors.
Nico has made it far, further than she feared she might, and she’s had the pleasure of firing a few of those men along the way.
Can the gentrified become the gentrifier?
She wonders this, when she drinks her natural wine, or when she spends her eye-watering salary on sheet masks and small-batch olive oils, single-origin coffees and bars of French soap with their branding stamped in.
She knows what real work looks like. Her dad’s busted knees, her mum’s blistered fingers.
She has a soft spot for Seb, because it’s so rare to see someone like him succeed in an industry filled with private-schooled posh boys who’ve bought themselves a place at the table read.
This is a charmed life. One not to take for granted, even when it seems…
‘Disappointing,’ Nico says.
‘Yes,’ Seb replies. ‘But not surprising.’
They’re talking about the role Nico had him auditioning for, part of the main crew in a geezer-friendly heist film set during the Blitz.
He didn’t get it. Even more disappointing is his reaction, like he knew he wouldn’t.
Like he wouldn’t have felt much different if he had.
The same thing is there, in his auditions.
With each new effort, you can see his trademark intensity waning.
‘I did say bad news first,’ Nico says. ‘They want you to audition for another role.’
Their food is arriving. Seb stares down into the pitch-black swirl of his squid-ink risotto.
‘Let me guess,’ he says. ‘A smaller role.’
‘Slightly smaller,’ Nico says. ‘A bad guy.’
Seb’s ears prick up. ‘The bad guy?’
‘Well, his henchman.’ A pause. ‘More like the henchman’s henchman.’
The length of Seb’s exhale could carry them through the rest of lunch.
He has a mood of deflation about him nowadays, as if the whole world is on his shoulders and it’s slowly squashing all the air out of him.
Maybe it’s because they just announced that his cop show has been cancelled after one season, despite the pleas of a very small but very passionate viewership.
Maybe it’s just the general atmosphere in the capital.
Outside, the sound of a dwindling Brexit protest, a few chants fizzling out before they can even get going.
There’s a sense of hopelessness, of people surrendering to their worst impulses.
Seb looks like a man who has given up. His agent actually has given up on him.
It had left a bad taste when she’d met with Richard recently, when he hadn’t even mentioned Seb.
There was only one name on his lips. Could Nico blame him?
She’d cast Jacob Steele in two roles this year alone.
A pensive gay romance penned by a beloved Oscar-nominee, and a big-budget drama that’s odds-on to become a phenomenon when it airs on HBO.
By contrast, she’d only taken this meeting with Seb because she promised Clara that she would.
‘I think he’s stagnating,’ Clara had said to Nico, just a couple of months ago. ‘He’s had a run of bad luck.’
They’d been sitting in the meeting room of an upmarket hotel in Holborn, shuffling polaroids as they tried to settle on a cast for Clara’s debut feature. For someone so chatty, Clara couldn’t half keep a secret. The script was astounding. Who knew she could write like that?
‘You didn’t want to write him into it?’ Nico had said.
‘It’s an all-female cast,’ Clara had replied. ‘He’s a better actor than he gets credit for. But he’s not that good.’
Clara’s film, An Enormous Mind, will start shooting in a fishing village in Galloway in the autumn.
Before then, Nico will need to lock in an entire township of actresses, all playing fractured versions of the same person.
Before their meeting, Clara had been working manically on script edits, had seemed gloriously sleep-deprived as she’d laid out her vision.
She’d rotated the stud in her nose, opened and closed her laptop, spun her phone around in her hand and her teacup around on its saucer.
She’d never been able to sit still, but now she could barely sit down, rising from her orange leather chair to pace as she struggled to put into words what it was she was trying to say.
‘You used to know him, didn’t you?’
Jacob Steele had come up again, because his name seemed to be everywhere at the moment. Nico had a vague idea that the three of them – Clara, Seb and Jacob – had once moved in the same circles, though she wasn’t sure where she’d got that from. Probably Agathe. If it’s gossip, it’s Agathe.
‘He was Jacob Stockley, back then,’ Clara had said. Her expression, at first shocked, became amused, then slightly annoyed. ‘We were together, on and off.’
‘You’re kidding,’ Nico had said, unable to hide her gasp. ‘I never knew.’
‘It was a lifetime ago,’ Clara had replied, with a wave of her hand.
‘That bad?’
Clara had laughed, then sighed. ‘Not all bad,’ she’d said. ‘You know what he’s like.’ A pause. ‘I admired his drive. He always said he’d end up where he is today.’ Clara had rubbed her arm, chewed her lip. ‘You make the future you want for yourself. You don’t let others decide it for you.’
Nico had wondered if something else was going on. Clara had had to leave early for a doctor’s appointment. There was a bruise in the crook of her arm where a needle might have gone in.
‘I suppose she wanted more for me,’ Seb says. ‘From me.’
Nico swallows. ‘Who?’
Seb gives her a look. ‘You know who.’
Nico goes to say something, but Seb stops her.
‘It’s alright,’ he says. ‘Clara wants to fix everything. She thinks I’m floundering.
She doesn’t understand—’ Seb stops himself, adjusts the cutlery in his empty bowl, lets out another sigh.
‘Sorry. You don’t need to hear about our relationship.
It’s just, I don’t think she really gets it.
’ He searches for the right words. ‘It’s not that I don’t want this role.
I think it’s that I don’t want any role. ’
Nico knows what he’s getting at. She leans back in her chair. ‘You’re done with acting.’
‘I’m not sure I was ever supposed to be an actor,’ Seb says. ‘And I’m not sure Clara is ever going to understand that.’
Once the plates are cleared and the bill is paid, Seb gives the dog a pat, and it snores itself awake.
Seb and Nico leave the restaurant together, both heading for Old Street station, and they talk as they aim for the end of the road, Jasper tottering after.
At some point, Seb stops talking, stops dead outside a particular building.
His eyes snag on the hoarding, the boarded-up windows, the heavy padlock and the signs declaring that property guardians are operating here.
‘You know this place?’ Nico says.
‘Know it?’ He shakes his head, as if he can’t put into words how much of an understatement she’s made. ‘This used to be my home. Literally. Up there.’
He raises one tattooed hand, points from the abandoned pub on the ground floor to the windows of the flat above it.
Nico remembers the place, an old grassroots music venue fallen on hard times.
The kind of pub where people used to go to watch grungy bands swing guitars around in the noughties.
Seb stares for what seems like forever, lost in the music of his own imagination.
Then Nico chivvies him along, hugs him meekly once they reach the entrance of the station.
‘Hey,’ she says, searching for the right cliché. ‘It’ll all work out.’
Seb simply smiles. Then he scoops up Jasper and heads for the escalators, becomes nothing more than a beanie hat disappearing into a faceless crowd. All around him, movie posters. On each of them, a name that isn’t his.