JOSH
Sure, it’s not like I haven’t given her ample reason to distrust me since then, but part of me wonders if Emily is still holding a seven-year-old grudge from the first time we met.
We’ve done four films since then, shot hundreds of scenes, travelled the world to promote it, but I can still remember the nerves and excitement of that first visit to Smithdown.
I was fourteen and didn’t know anything about anything, but of course I didn’t want anyone to know that.
Everyone else had chaperones from their family – generally parents or grandparents but sometimes older siblings who wanted to trade in their day job for the daily stipend and a brush with fame.
Not me, though. My parents were too busy with other projects in LA, so the studio hired this guy, Matt, to follow me around and make sure I wasn’t getting mistreated or whatever.
But the truth was, I did feel nervous, for lots of reasons.
One reason which made me burn up with shame was that I missed my parents and felt very alone in England under the care of Legacy Pictures.
Look, now I can see that the idea of sending a fourteen-year-old child five and a half thousand miles away from home, without his parents, to do a job he was barely qualified for is insane.
But at the time I thought it was my responsibility to just man up and get on with it, that any other kid would be psyched at the freedom, so I acted like it.
And it’s not like it wasn’t fun, too. It was a lot of fun.
Another reason to feel nervous was precisely what Matt had already identified.
I don’t think the term nepo baby had been invented by the first Wonderwick film – thank God – but that’s exactly what I was.
Or . . . what I am. Either way, I knew that people on Wonderwick knew that my parents were not only big Hollywood producers, but were producing this specific film that I had been cast in.
It felt like a heavy load to have to bring to set on the first day.
I had been on TV and movie sets before, of course, but they were nothing like this. Even the sound stages of Hollywood studio lots I had been on felt flimsy in comparison to the Wonderwick world that had been created at Smithdown. For us. And I was the male lead. No pressure.
Matt and I were greeted by a runner who gave us a whistle-stop tour of the set, introducing us to as many people as possible, from hair and makeup to carpenters to sound engineers to the background actors.
It felt like every corner of every space contained someone working frenetically to get the project going.
Everyone I met at the studio that day was kind, friendly and professional, and I can’t help but wish I had taken a leaf out of their books.
But hey, what did I know? I was a teenager and simultaneously kind of an asshole and kind of terrified, all of which combined to really foreground the asshole side of things.
We stood outside one of the spaces next to the biggest sound stage that was being used as a green room until the trailers arrived and I could hear noises and curious banging sounds coming from inside.
‘Well, that’s the tour done. You want to chill for a bit? Do you need something to eat?’ Matt asked me. I shook my head. ‘I’m starving – you’ll be all right on your own, won’t you? I’ll come back and pick you up to take you to wardrobe in, say, fifteen minutes?’
‘Uh, no, I won’t wander off. I’ll be fine,’ I told him but as soon as I walked in, I was almost knocked down by Max Rogers who had Tommy Wells in a headlock.
Of course, at the time I didn’t know they were Max and Tommy, to me they were just two boys fighting.
One tall with a puff of dark blond hair and the other stockier, with thick dark eyebrows and a face that was kinda sweet.
‘Woah!’ I laughed, as they barrelled into me at great speed mid-wrestling-match.
They both looked up at me, panting. ‘Sorry, mate! We were just trying to settle who gets the last doughnut,’ Tommy said.
I frowned at them. ‘I’m pretty sure there are more doughnuts at craft services, probably not worth fighting over.’
‘Just a bit of fun, mate. I’m Max.’ He grinned at me broadly while Tommy wrapped his arms around me and clapped me on my back so hard it felt like he was administering the Heimlich manoeuvre. ‘And you’re the famous Josh Sacco.’
‘The Yank interloper.’ Tommy released me and wiggled his eyebrows significantly.
‘It’s not that deep.’ I tried to head off the topic of conversation with a casual wave of my hand but Max and Tommy wouldn’t let it go.
‘Oh yes it is! Sylvara Runequill was very clear about wanting an all-British cast for this and yet here you are snaffling up the male lead,’ Max said.
‘I guess I was just the right person for the job,’ I said, a rush of anxiety in the pit of my stomach.
I hoped every interaction with my fellow cast members wasn’t going to be quite like this.
Where were the naive little children who wanted to know all about life in Hollywood?
Who were these bouncing, wrestling menaces?
‘So, uh, are you two, like, old friends?’
‘We actually met during auditions,’ Max said, chewing on the doughnut, clearly the victor.
Just then, we were interrupted by another newcomer.
Now her I recognised from the headshots I’d seen.
Emily Montgomery. My co-star. Obviously, being separated by an ocean, we hadn’t met in person during the casting process, and the video calls to check if we had ‘chemistry’ felt like a brief, tick-box exercise.
Whether I liked it or not, Tommy was right: I was, indeed, the Yank interloper.
‘Tommy and Max, the wig lady wants to see you two next,’ Emily said in a bright, clipped, slightly bossy voice.
‘Aye aye, captain.’ Max saluted her and the two of them dashed off, leaving us alone in the green room.
I took in my co-star, this girl with incredibly shiny, extremely straight brown hair, pale skin, eyes glinting at me curiously, one brown and one blue.
She was wearing a truly bizarre outfit involving both a choker and cowboy boots which was strangely at odds with how otherwise refined and polished she seemed for a thirteen-year-old.
‘You must be Emily,’ I said, as confidently as I could manage.
She nodded. ‘And you’re Joshua.’ The way she said it in her English accent made it sound like no version of my name I’d ever known.
‘Josh, actually,’ I corrected her. ‘No one calls me Joshua, not even my mom.’
‘Got it, I’m sorry,’ she said, so seriously that it sounded like she wanted to take out a little notebook and write it down so she didn’t forget.
And then silence fell. Without the lively energy of Tommy and Max to fill the room, it was like we were both standing there waiting for something to happen.
We both looked down at our shoes or the bright white walls of the green room, as I desperately tried to think of something to say to her, this person I was going to be working with across several films for the rest of my teens and early twenties.
‘So, which scene are you most excited about shooting?’ Emily finally asked me. Although I was grateful she had broken the silence, I also found the question slightly excruciating.
‘Uhhhh.’ I furrowed my brow as if I was thinking deeply.
Oh, yeah – that was another reason I was nervous.
I kinda hadn’t read the Wonderwick books.
Outside of required reading, I’d never read any books growing up, we just weren’t that kind of household.
So not only was I not completely sure of my lines, often I would also not really understand the significance of something that was happening in the plot.
Any proper fan would know it was a building block for something that would happen later, but not me.
‘The scene where Rowan has to tell his whole family he’s leaving to find the Heart of Wonderwick with Linderley.
It’s pretty emotional, but I think I can take it,’ I said, feigning modesty but really I wanted her to be impressed that I was looking forward to taking on an emotional scene rather than one of the big action ones.
But no. She was not impressed. ‘Isn’t that the scene they had all the Rowan Clearwaters read for their audition?
’ Emily asked, keeping her tone light, but I could tell it was a very pointed question.
This is a key Emily Montgomery trait. Not only does she always know what she’s doing, she probably also knows what you’re meant to be doing.
‘I mean, sure.’ I shrugged my shoulders. ‘They just happened to pick my favourite scene from the script. I mean, from the book.’ I had to hope the scene was actually in the books and hadn’t been added by the screenwriter for the adaptation.
It was as if she could see right through me, and I hated every second of it. ‘You have read the books, right?’ She looked panicked.
‘Of course I have, how could you even ask me that!’ I was already starting to sweat under her laser beam gaze. What was with this girl?
She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean .
. . I just want this film to be perfect.
It’s my favourite book, you know. I’ve dreamed of this since I was little .
. . being in Wonderwick. I didn’t know what that meant when I first had the thought, the idea of wanting to be in Wonderwick .
. . I guess I thought of it in a sort of childish fantasy way, that one day I would wake up and I wouldn’t be in my bed anymore but in a treehouse high off the ground, living in a forest with this group of friends who were kind of like a family but .
. . now I guess it means being in this film.
’ Emily spoke with such sincerity and passion that it almost took my breath away.
What would it feel like to care this much about a project?
I couldn’t imagine it. Of course I wanted to be there, wanted to do this movie, but for her it felt like it really meant something.
‘That’s cute,’ I said, as dismissively as I could manage.
I wanted to show her I was, I don’t know, cool and that I didn’t care and that caring was lame.
Everything about this first meeting got my back up, and, let it be said once again, I was fourteen years old and even more of an asshole than I am now. ‘But I’m just here to do a job.’
Emily looked wounded, which was exactly what I had hoped for. I needed her on the back foot so she didn’t keep showing up how little I knew about Wonderwick. ‘Well, if you . . . if you want to run lines or anything before we start shooting, just let me know.’
How did she know that was exactly what I needed and probably the last thing I would ever ask for?
Look, if someone held a gun to my head that day, I promise you I would have known my lines.
But I wouldn’t necessarily have known the context for the lines or been able to recite them without a gun to my head.
But we weren’t starting filming that day, so I still had time. No big deal, right?
I sighed, obnoxiously. ‘I’d better go. I’ve got a final fitting with the costume department,’ I said. And then a thought occurred to me, a different way to put her in her place. ‘But I see you’ve already been.’ I side-eyed her outfit.
‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’ Emily bit back, more sharply than I would ever have expected a girl in her position to do.
I puffed up my chest – probably – and affected an air of nonchalance. ‘Oh, you mean this is just what you wear in everyday life? I thought you were going method, trying to get into character . . . inhabiting the role of Lindy Jones or something.’
‘It’s Linderley,’ she said, rolling her eyes.
She didn’t try to fight back against what I had said, and before I knew it Matt had come to ferry me off to wardrobe, but when I looked back over my shoulder, I saw her looking down at herself, at her outfit, as if she was trying to figure out what she had got wrong.
That could have been the end of it, I could have apologised to her later that day or even the next.
But for some reason, maybe because I was a teenage nepo baby from Beverly Hills, apologising didn’t come naturally to me, so I didn’t.
And that interaction kinda set the tone for the next seven years.