FEBRUARY 1994
WHAT HAPPENED, SIMPLY, IS THAT IT’S EASY TO BE THE nice guy when your girlfriend isn’t more successful than you.
There’s the sort of man who ties his masculinity to some sort of provider role.
There’s the sort who sees his girlfriend’s dreams as whims and his own as serious things to be sought after, ones that take precedence over hers.
And there’s the sort who is their girlfriend’s biggest supporter, their besotted champion—or at least they perform that role very well to the outside world—until the moment she starts earning the things he feels he deserves.
Enter: Oisín Connellan.
It started slowly. In the rush of Dreadbase’s release, we hadn’t had time to slow down and consider what it would mean for us.
Its first-week box office was better than we’d hoped, though nowhere near indicative of the phenomenon it would become.
So when Ruchi forwarded agent interest, I was screaming, climbing onto the chair of our houseshare, and popping the cheap cava Oisín had rushed out to buy. He’d grasped me before I could get down, spinning me around in his arms and declaring just how proud he was.
His own offers came a few weeks later, after Dreadbase had taken off and about two days after Ruchi told me just what parts of me were being perceived most by filmgoers.
“It’s good, Nadine. I know it doesn’t feel it but—”
“I want to be taken seriously,” I’d choked, staring at the newspaper spread before me—“naDDine” in bold black type. “I actually care about all this.”
“I know. So choose an agent, put me in touch, and we’ll strategize your next role.”
I wined and dined the ones on the London circuit, but LA was still in my sights, so when a phone call came through from Victor Dale, I knew before we’d even got to the point of discussing my future prospects that he was the one.
“I’ve met you before,” he said in lieu of hello. He was from Louisiana, and his voice still held a charming lilt of that accent. “Haven’t I? Couldn’t shake the thought when I watched that film.”
“Langstone House,” I said a little nervously. By twenty years old, the person I’d been at eighteen seemed distinctly embarrassing—though now I suspect she wasn’t all that different a character. “The Stamper party.”
“Right. Orange dress.”
After Sundance, CADS had started to feel like a blur—a hazy sort of dream. But I remembered Harper in that tight mesh dress, her pitch-dark hair bold against the umber like a fire simmering in the night sky.
“No,” I said, my mouth dry. “That wasn’t me.”
“Well, regardless, you’re not someone the world is going to forget in a hurry. Not if I can help it. How soon can you be in LA?”
His office sorted everything. Oisín took no convincing to come with me, and soon his own agent was asking for it anyway.
Besides, London had become too close. Our last week there was marred by tourists snapping photos of us on the tube, people rushing us for signatures when we went out for coffee, and, perhaps most startlingly, a horde of flashing bulbs that had surrounded the restaurant we’d decided to celebrate our success in.
“This is amazing,” Oisín said, staring at the flashes that had me flinching.
I could just about wrap my head around the general public being amazed at our existence, given I’d been raised on a belief that transcending that fourth wall would be the closest I might come to magic and certainly to fulfillment.
But the press were something else—they did not care; they wished to shock, to sell.
I might work with them happily on a press tour or perform some version of myself for their lenses, but this felt like a loss of control.
The paparazzi were worse in LA, but at least getting away was easier, piling into cars with dark tinted windows or phoning our publicists to get them to negotiate a ceasefire.
“Your relationship is keeping the momentum rolling into your next project,” Ruchi assured me when I had called in tears, having been chased by cameras after Oisín and I had gone to the gym together. “Say the word and I’ll pull strings, but I don’t think you actually want that.”
“No, I suppose not.”
“I mean it. If it gets too much, let me know. But for now I’ll speak to Victor about getting you moved to a hotel with its own gym facilities. One good film deal and you’ll have a gated house in the Hills.”
The very edge of Westwood was as close as we could get, a three-bed house with views (if you angled yourself right) of the hills soaring above.
It wouldn’t register that I lived there, that gone was the mold-ridden bathroom and abrasive housemates.
The counters were marble (real marble, not patterned linoleum), and the shower poured in a waterfall (had seven different settings), and the closet (god, the closet!) was three times the size of my childhood bedroom, half of it already stocked.
The deal I ended up taking wasn’t good—there were offers with more money, even ones I hadn’t had to audition for.
But Wherever You Are was a shoo-in for the Oscars. And sure, Casey might not be a major part, but she had intentionality to her, a drive that threaded the narrative together and a steadfastness that said to the world this was who I was.
Not a pair of erect nipples in a jumpsuit.
———
Oisín loved Los Angeles. That joie de vivre I’d found so intoxicating in Europe took on new life here. He wanted to taste it all, experience it all, never rest for a moment. There was always a party to go to, someone to meet, a new place to be photographed.
I didn’t even try to keep up. I enjoyed it, I did—LA felt more than anywhere I’d been before, both in the good and the bad.
The lights were brighter, the shadows darker.
But what drew me in most were the people and opportunities.
So while Oisín went golfing with movie stars, I drove across town to auditions and then raced back via Beverly Hills for lunches with casting directors.
(I didn’t even care that not all of them led to deals, not when I was sampling oysters and truffles and goddamn caviar.)
We spent two months filming Wherever You Are in New Mexico, and it was a relief to flee the crowds of Los Angeles, even if I flitted back at weekends to see Oisín, who was filming Code Delta at a studio.
He’d tried to explain the plot, but it seemed to just be a series of car chases and explosions that he was confident would be the first in a years-long, era-defining series.
I’d missed him sorely, mostly at night when I found I couldn’t sleep as well without him holding me.
I checked every nook and cranny of my luggage, certain he’d have hidden a note somewhere about how much he loved and missed me—just like he did in London. But I found nothing.
When I called him, he was at another party, holding the phone aloft to yell, “Everybody, say hi to Nadine—yes, Nadine Heywood. You know, from Dreadbase? The jumpsuit? Yeah, that’s her!”
I mumbled something back, told him to ring me when he was alone, and hung up. The phone never rang.
The next time I was back in LA, he chartered a catamaran—clinging just close enough to the coastline for the lenses to reach us.
I thought it would be atmospheric, but it wasn’t—he’d invited half of Hollywood, and the party was in full swing, cameras snapping like a second beat while I clung to the edges, trying to keep my eyes on the horizon and not think about every rolling wave beneath me and the alcohol in the air and definitely trying not to vomit.
This was what girls like Harper wanted. Fame and celebrity were the benefits of acting, not a game you played to allow you to pursue your craft. I didn’t want to be them, I thought, just as my nausea gave way and I emptied the contents of my stomach into the Pacific below.
Now, I longed for nothing more than to book a hotel with Oisín for a whole weekend and never leave it. I wanted to order room service and talk and fuck and lean my head against his chest to listen to his heartbeat.
“You know we can’t do that,” he’d said. “We have to be purposeful right now.”
“Oisín, please …”
“I love you too much to let you do this, Nadine. I know what your dreams mean to you. Well, this is how we get them.”
Which was, reluctantly, true. So we went to the beach instead, let ourselves be photographed kissing on the sand, me wearing his shirt over my bikini so no one could get too gratuitous a shot.
He wanted to go clubbing, but I drew the line at that—the boat had been bad enough.
I was trying to brand myself as a serious actress, not a party girl.
“What do you want?” he’d snapped, clearly annoyed.
“Romance!”
“Well, what the fuck does romance look like to you?”
A lack of cameras, for one.
Don’t misunderstand me, I would have happily pretended to date a costar. I would have let myself be shot wherever, doing whatever, if it furthered my ambition. But this was real. I didn’t like the way it had blurred the line.
Oisín to me was notes pinned to the fridge and flowers in my hotel room—love like an arrow, shot cleanly at me.
Now he took that affection and spun it not in a direct line but outward.
Diluted for the cameras, it all felt hollow.
I wanted privacy. I wanted intimacy. I wanted what we once had and what I could now feel slipping through my fingers.
“You need that answered, Oisín? Dinner, movies, take me bowling for Christ’s sake—that would be a shot wouldn’t it? Small-town sweethearts—”
“We’re film stars, Nadine. We don’t get to be small-town anymore.”
I fell in love with Oisín in the quiet woodland, in the quaint bars of Vienna, in a damp room on a crooked street of London.
And I fell out of love with him in front of a camera with the whole world watching.
———
Before Wherever You Are debuted, I took on a few more bit parts, including some on TV and a second major role in a smaller film. Leave a Light On was a tender story, almost entirely shot on the same lot in Alberta. It was about people, pure and simple. It was bleak yet hopeful. I loved it.