The reader
‘Thank you for your time,’ says Nico. ‘We’ll be in touch.’
She concludes every audition in exactly the same way, and they’ve already done so many that Lucy is getting good at reading Nico’s tone of voice.
The first sentence light and airy, the latter landing like a hammer-blow.
If these cadences were swapped around, this guy’s name would be getting a little asterisk, his agent expecting a call.
Alas, he seems to have guessed what Lucy already knows.
It’s like someone has stuck a pin in him, like he visibly deflates a little with each step towards the already-opening door.
‘Next!’
If you believe film is a fairy-tale business, you’d need only sit for a day at this trestle table in this dimly lit Bloomsbury basement to dispel all your illusions.
Minimal introductions. No small talk. The script they’ve been given does the talking.
It will speak for itself a hundred times today, from a hundred different mouths in a hundred different hopeful faces.
It’s a production line, a factory farm, the way they shepherd in each young man and give him two minutes to totter in front of them before taking a bolt-gun to his hopes and dreams. Still, the door never stops opening, and the optimistic men never stop coming.
There are some glass-half-empty men, too.
Confident men and quietly confident men; tall men and short men and men who lied about their heights in their submissions; men with impenetrable accents, men putting on impenetrable accents; blandly handsome men with arms like tree trunks and wooden demeanours; strange-looking skinny men with interesting faces that promise presence and sometimes deliver.
Men who won’t get another audition. Men who should never get another audition. And a small handful of men who might.
The latest is one of the ones who lied about his height, and he puffs himself up as large as he can before he launches with admirable melodrama into the allotted monologue.
Nico, with her immaculate braids and her withering eye, is the casting director.
This is her operation, and she’s wielding her pen like a pickaxe.
The film’s director, a Swede who hasn’t cracked a smile all morning, sits to her side.
On his other side is Agathe, the Swede’s long-suffering producer, Nico’s new-ish collaborator and Lucy’s frankly formidable boss.
Rounding out the table is Clara, the other assistant at the production company.
She and Lucy split the load, usually, of setting meetings and answering emails and doing coffee runs for entire writers’ rooms. So, Clara is the other reader, and the pair of them take it in turns to feed lines to hopefuls so neither of them goes home without a voice.
‘I’ll start you off,’ says Clara, once the actor has caught his breath from his monologue. ‘How could you?’ she says, her voice snapping so suddenly into scripted anger that the actor is momentarily taken aback. ‘I thought I told you never to step through this door again.’
After a moment, he recovers himself, and the actor and Clara work their way through the requisite scene.
Agathe nods slightly throughout. Nico, almost imperceptibly, shakes her head.
He isn’t the one. Clara is having to do all the work.
She has only been at the company for a few months, but she’s hit the ground running.
At first she’d seemed like a moody Margot Tenenbaum, all sharp cheekbones and smudged eyeliner, but it only took one conversation about Scandinavian cinema for Clara to out herself as a nerd who can get so breathless talking about her favourite films that she needs to be put in time out.
Even more impressive is her ability to leave this frenetic energy at the door.
To focus like a laser, when the work requires it.
You’d think she’d be finding it difficult, acting out a break-up over and over with a string of total strangers to an audience of industry professionals.
After all, it’s not that long ago that she broke up with her own boyfriend.
Clara had told Lucy that Jacob was more like a collaborator, that they’d once shared a single-minded, near-sociopathic focus on bettering themselves for the big lives they had planned.
They had spent their uni years fucking and fighting and rolling out of bed to film self-tapes and short films, auditions for the kind of people they wanted to become.
It was only in the real world that they began to fall apart.
They weren’t even in competition, but outside their student bubble, things were more spiteful.
Jacob shot down Clara’s suggestions, screwed up her drawings, made fun of her ideas in front of their friends.
Clara resented any acting jobs Jacob did get, made sure to remind him his roles were minor.
When she told Jacob that she’d got an actual job in actual film production, he’d run the whole gamut of emotions.
Annoyed she hadn’t told him she’d applied, then amused that she’d sold out, then ultimately pleased that she was finally putting her silly little directorial ambitions aside.
The latter comment had been the final nail in the coffin.
Clara had said that an actor like him should be better at spotting a faked orgasm. Then she’d left for good.
‘Good riddance,’ said Lucy, baffled at this barrage of personal information from a colleague she’d only known for two weeks.
‘There’ll be more like him,’ Agathe had said, because she loves gossip, and because they’d been conducting the conversation right outside her office, loud enough for her to hear.
Lucy didn’t say that she knew exactly who Jacob was, that he was already sleeping his way through several members of Lucy’s own friendship group. Agathe didn’t say that she knew him, too, and was currently considering him for a role in another film co-produced by her.
‘Thank you for your time,’ Nico says, as the audition limps to a close. ‘We’ll be in touch.’
Nico says that casting is like a love story.
Whatever the role, you’re asking an audience to fall in love with this person.
The best villains are the ones you love to hate, and the best love interests are the ones you hate to love.
And while the role they’re casting now is little more than a brooding love interest for a secondary character, you only hire Nico if you want to find the one.
Could this be him? As the next contender ducks into the room and walks slowly towards the table, it’s already easy to imagine him mopping the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief and swinging at wheat with a scythe, stooping under the doorjamb of a cottage too small for the dreams he’d once had.
Nico looks straight to his name, taps against it with her pen.
Agathe smiles brightly, and even the Swede sits up a little in his chair.
Next to Lucy, Clara stiffens. A gasp escapes from her small mouth.
‘Seb Bonami,’ he says, by way of introduction. ‘Reading for the part of Erasmus Weir.’
His voice is deep. He’s tall, broad-shouldered, with wavy hair and a patchwork of tattoos.
A smile that seems a little more like a grimace summons itself in his short, dark beard.
His volcanic eyes pass along the line of his assembled audience.
When his gaze settles on Clara, any hint of a smile vanishes.
Lucy glances at Clara. She’s looking down at her own copy of the script, cheeks reddening. There is a long and unnerving silence, as if this Seb is so intense that the entire room needs an extra moment to take him in.
‘When you’re ready,’ Nico says, encouragingly. Lucy can already see the asterisk being marked, the name being underlined.
Seb Bonami clears his throat, looks down at his script.
He struggles with the monologue at first. He’s somewhat stiff, somewhat thrown.
By the time he’s finished, the asterisk has turned into a question mark.
It’s Lucy’s turn to feed the lines, but just as she’s preparing to ask if he’s ready, Clara jumps the gun.
She’s mixed up the order, somehow. That laser focus has been knocked askew.
‘How could you?’ Clara says, suddenly, shakily. Her voice is different this time. Her cheeks are still burning. ‘I thought I told you never to step through this door again.’
Nico looks at her. So does Agathe. The Swede raises an eyebrow. Seb’s face seems to say, are we really doing this? But his jaw is set, and it doesn’t take him long to dive in. He’s memorised the lines, and he’s looking straight at Clara.
‘You don’t own me,’ he says. ‘I may be beneath you in station, but I’m not a dog for you to kick.’
‘Should I fetch my husband, then?’
‘Damn your husband,’ Seb says. ‘And damn you.’
‘You should remember who you’re talking to.’
‘And you should remember what we were.’
There’s a pause. Lucy knows that everyone else in the room is feeling what she’s feeling, sensing what she’s sensing.
Seb is still staring at Clara, and Clara is now staring back at him, script abandoned.
It’s as if there’s only space for Clara and Seb in this room, as if everything else must dissolve simply to allow them to be.
‘I have been in hell, this past year,’ Seb says, his voice cracking. ‘I have thought of nothing but you. I have woken to thoughts of you. I have tossed and turned to thoughts of you. I have toiled in the shadow of your house from dawn till dusk, thinking only of you.’
All embarrassment has left Clara now. She reads not as if she is a reader, but as if this is a role she was born to play. ‘I have felt it,’ she says, breathlessly. ‘I have felt you. I have watched you. I have missed you.’ A pause. ‘We can’t do this. We shouldn’t.’
‘And yet,’ Seb says, his own breath quickening, something lightening in those dark eyes after all. ‘Here we are.’
A stunned silence. Lucy wonders, for a second, if there might be applause.
Seb turns his eyes downwards. Clara clears her throat and shuffles the pages in front of her, as if suddenly aware of her superiors.
She cares about her job. But Nico seems only to care about Clara’s reaction, and to whom she is reacting.
‘Thank you for your time,’ Nico says seriously. Her voice lifts. She smiles. ‘We’ll be in touch.’
After Seb leaves, Agathe nods at Nico, and Nico nods at Agathe, and a Sharpie circles a name on paper, then underlines it twice.
Lucy makes a comment to Clara, but Clara asks if she might be excused to get some water.
They decide to break for lunch, and Clara is out of the room before she can hear the Swede speak for the first time that day.
‘I wonder what he drew on,’ he says, tapping one finger against his slab of a chin. ‘For all that hurt.’