Chapter One #2
Everyone was already sitting around a shiny glass table when we arrived and the room was abuzz with conversation.
I instantly felt calmer at the sight of my beloved publicist and best friend Chloe, her halo of peroxide blonde curls and her penchant for short, tight dresses with sky-high heels, her big mouth permanently painted in shades of hot pink, bright red, vibrant purple that somehow managed to never budge, no matter how many margaritas she drank.
She was someone to be underestimated at your peril.
The other side of her was my eternally star-struck manager Glen, followed by Lisa Halley, the senior vice-president of production at Legacy Pictures, aka the biggest production company in the world, and then Martin McBride, the director of three of the top-ten highest-grossing films of all time.
They all leaped to their feet at the sight of us. ‘There’s my favourite client!’ Glen boomed at the same time Martin shouted, ‘Emily! Our little star!’
This kind of reaction still caught me off guard.
I know it’s silly, but sometimes I just didn’t feel like that person, that celebrity.
It was like they were talking about someone else.
I hugged both of them in turn before squeezing Chloe slightly longer than the rest. Lisa, the studio head, always scared me a little bit.
She carried a crocodile skin Hermès bag which seemed just right for her: expensive, luxurious, in high demand.
She had the kind of surgical enhancements that pre-fame Emily wouldn’t have even been able to detect, but I had been in the business long enough by now to know that it was almost certainly the work of Dr Sam, the most discreet and light-handed surgeon in Beverly Hills.
We held each other slightly at arm’s length in a stiff hug, and then it was time to get to work.
Legacy had ordered in catering from the excellent Japanese restaurant around the corner from the office, in a quantity so extravagant I felt guilty about the food waste just looking at it.
Pleasantries over, the room settled down into silence so we could get on with business. ‘Emily,’ Lisa said, fixing me with a shark-like stare, like we were the only two people in the room. ‘We are just so excited about the next Wonderwick movie.’
‘That’s an understatement!’ Martin brandished his napkin. ‘Be prepared to go stratospheric with this one, Ems.’
‘To the stratosphere!’ Glen said, raising a glass with a slightly maniacal glint in his eye.
‘To the stratosphere!’ Mum gamely raised her own glass.
If I had known, when I turned up to my first-ever open audition – trying my luck against over a thousand other girls for the hotly contested part of Linderley Jones – what ‘stratospheric’ felt like, would I still have gone?
Because I knew why they were so excited. This was the film that the Wonderwick fans had been excited about since the adaptation was announced. The instalment where Linderley Jones and Rowan Clearwater finally kiss. Which for me meant . . . well, I couldn’t put it off any longer.
I had to kiss Josh Sacco.
The most annoying, obnoxious, self-infatuated, tedious, person you could imagine.
The nepo baby to end all nepo babies. The Josh Sacco.
I’d filmed scenes where I was being chased by a tennis ball on a stick because the monster is being added in post-production, but this was going to be the real test of my acting capabilities.
‘It’ll be a completely manageable kind of stratospheric, though,’ Chloe said, reassuringly, her eyes darting towards me. She knew I was just a little bit nervous about this film, but also knew that the hype building around it was only a good thing for me as an actor.
‘Of course.’ I shrugged, trying very hard to play it cool. Cool was not my default setting.
‘Yes,’ Glen said, drawing his chair closer to the table. ‘We’re keen to get a look at the final script ASAP.’
‘I thought the last one I received was the final one?’ I said, panic rising that we were set to start filming the following week and I might not be completely prepared.
‘Oh it basically is! Don’t worry about it. Your lines won’t change between now and then, Ems.’ Martin waved away our concerns. ‘We’re ninety-nine per cent of the way there, just ironing out—’ he cleared his throat ‘—the details, you know, some of the, er, non-verbal elements.’
‘Such as?’ Chloe’s eyebrows had crept so far up her forehead they had almost disappeared into her mop of blonde curls.
‘Nothing major,’ Lisa said, frowning slightly too emphatically, adjusting her Cartier Panthère watch.
I smiled and shrugged as breezily as I could manage.
‘As far as I’m concerned, the kiss is the only potential issue, and it’s written straightforwardly in the book so I’m not worried.
’ If I said ‘I’m not worried’ often enough, maybe it would come true.
But the fact was, they were starting to worry me.
‘Well,’ Martin piped up, tossing the shell of an edamame bean onto his plate.
‘Mmmm?’ Chloe turned to him. It shouldn’t really be my publicist’s job to grill the director and producer, but unfortunately for me, Glen was a Martin McBride fanboy, so more often than not he struggled to hold him to account on my behalf.
‘We’re in discussions around whether we use an intimacy coordinator for this movie,’ Lisa said smoothly with a blank smile.
‘I don’t think an intimacy coordinator is necessary for a kiss, right?’ I asked.
Martin waved his hand expansively. ‘We’ll probably have to have one for hugs next.’ He looked around the table, waiting for nods of agreement.
‘It is just a kiss, isn’t it, Martin?’ Chloe said, fixing him with a gaze like an iron grip. The energy in the room shifted in a moment. Martin broke eye contact with Chloe and glanced sideways at Lisa.
‘Actually . . .’ He cleared his throat and set down his knife and fork.
‘Mmmm?’ Mum’s nostrils flared. Always a bad sign.
‘We were thinking,’ Lisa spoke up, in that bold, forthright American way that studio executives do.
‘What about taking things a little bit spicier, Ems?’ Martin looked at me without blinking, and I could almost make out some dollar signs in his eyes. ‘The fans love you and Josh! This is the moment they’ve all been waiting for! Why not give them what they really want?’
‘This could be a great opportunity for you, Emily,’ Lisa urged. ‘You’re not a girl anymore, you’re a young woman. Why not turn that to your advantage?’
I tried to figure out quite what I wanted to say, but the discussion carried on without me.
I knew it was coming, of course. I knew that was what we would end up discussing at this meeting.
But it still felt weird. Me, spicy? Would anyone even buy that?
Them telling me I’m ‘not a girl anymore’ and that I’m a young woman has a different ring to it than me telling my mum I want to do a small indie film instead of a big budget children’s comedy.
But the fact was, it was still true. I was growing up, and so was Linderley Jones.
‘And what does Josh say about all of this? I assume you’ve already discussed it with him?
’ Mum cut in. She was right: nothing happened on Wonderwick without it getting past Josh and his high-powered Hollywood parents.
If you produced some of the biggest films of the 2000s, your kid was pretty much guaranteed to be allowed to do whatever he wanted in the following decades.
‘Oh, Josh is totally up for taking things to the next level,’ Martin reassured her.
‘I bet he is,’ I murmured quietly. I knew Josh.
He probably thought the whole thing was just hilarious – a new way of winding up silly, strait-laced Emily, now he had just about outgrown things like depositing a large (but harmless) spider in my dressing room on the first film, after we’d known each other for about three weeks, or changing the language on my phone to Mandarin.
‘Darling,’ Mum said, laying a hand on my arm. ‘You know you don’t have to do anything you’re not comfortable with.’
‘Yes,’ Chloe agreed. ‘I’m not exactly delighted about the way we’ve been ambushed with this.’ She cut her eyes at Glen.
Glen raised his hands. ‘Sorry, ladies, but I think it’s a great idea. Giving you a, uh, shall we say, saucy edge will make you all the more bankable for future projects. It’ll open you up to a whole new world of characters.’
I didn’t remind him that the Edgar Malek movie he was trying to talk me out of in favour of a more lucrative project also represented a whole new world for me character-wise, that I was already there and didn’t need to be ‘saucy’ or ‘spicy’ to do it.
But I knew very well that it was what the fans wanted, and I was all about living up to expectations.
Plus, knowing quite how much control the fans had over some of our creative decisions meant I was very much incentivised to comply.
‘So, Emily.’ Martin turned to me. ‘What do you say?’
I thought of that thread on WeRateCelebs only that morning, the accusations that I’m frigid .
. . uptight . . . stuck-up . . . and I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe they had a point.
Obviously it wasn’t a nice thing to say and they certainly wouldn’t have been saying it about me if I were a guy.
But I knew that was the image I had in the media, I knew that’s what people thought of me.
Whether or not it was true or fair didn’t really make any difference.
‘Ears too big’ felt like the least of my problems now and my ‘ideal skull shape’ (bleurgh) wouldn’t get me out of this.
I supposed it would be one way to prove them wrong .
. . and to really test my acting skills.
To be seen as a grown-up at last. Especially since Darcy Jackson was coming onto the next film.
I took a deep breath, set my shoulders and hoped desperately that I was doing the right thing. ‘Whatever’s best for Wonderwick.’