Chapter Ten
Arriving on the set of Wonderwick felt like coming home.
I’d been here so many times and it never got any less exciting.
Wonderwick took me out of school when I was in Year Nine but for me, the start of a new film felt like a new term after the summer holidays.
Mike deposited us in the sprawling car park and it was time for the fun to begin.
Costume fittings, hair and makeup trials, chats with various heads of department, discussions about stunts, negotiations over where I would have to be at what time, what I wanted in my trailer, if I had any special requirements for catering .
. . those were the last-minute things that would be taking place to prepare us all for Wonderwick Woods: The Far Shores.
But before I got too deep in pre-shoot prep, I couldn’t help but swing by ‘my house’, just to check on it.
Camila, the production designer, was a cinematic legend and her work on Wonderwick was some of her best, translating the style, the look, the feel of the books onto screen in such precise detail that it provoked gasps of delight in anyone who visited the set.
The ramshackle underground cottage that Linderley Jones and her family lived in was as familiar to me as my own childhood bedroom.
The heavy, dark, carved oak furniture, the wood-burning stove, the pantry lined with almost luminescent jars with cloth coverings for lids.
Craggy walls with alcoves cut into them to serve as shelves, piles of firewood stacked on the floor.
Cast iron pans (as replicated in a Wonderwick merch collaboration with Le Creuset, a full set of which were sitting in one of the boxes in my flat) and hand-woven baskets hung from the ceiling, while piles of meticulously crafted fake vegetables were stowed away in little cubbyholes overhead, accessed by knobbly wooden ladders.
At the centre was a fire, often roaring and crackling in the films, but now quiet and cold, waiting to spring to life when needed.
A cauldron was suspended above the empty hearth, and strung across the middle of the room was a washing line heavy with clothes in wool, cotton and linen.
Everything here spoke of the natural world, of the raw hands of a worker, of rosy cheeks warmed by the fire. I knew every inch of it.
On the sound stage next door, I found my bedroom.
Well, Linderley’s bedroom. A room to inspire a thousand teenagers to go full cottagecore.
I sat down on the ochre gingham bedspread (Wonderwick x Piglet in Bed – exclusive to John Lewis) covering sleigh-style bed and looked around.
Dried flowers hung like bunting from the dark wooden rafters on the low ceiling, books towered in piles on shelves and on the flagstone floor, which between the books and the Turkish rug, was almost invisible.
‘Thought I might find you here,’ Courtney said, sitting down next to me on the bed. ‘I was looking for you.’
‘Oh?’
‘Have you heard about the tattoo?’
I frowned at her. ‘Whose tattoo?’
‘Josh, of course, who else?’
‘Oh no, what’s he done?’
‘Massive tattoo of a roaring lion on his left bicep. Basically covers the whole of his upper arm.’ Courtney grimaced.
‘That is so Josh Sacco. Has Pyotr had a meltdown?’ Josh’s makeup artist, Pyotr, was a highly strung Russian man with the sharpest eyebrows you’d ever seen. He would absolutely not appreciate this.
‘Mini meltdown, apparently it’s not quite as big a job as I thought it was going to be, but it’s still half an hour’s work every day.’
‘Why would he do this?!’
‘Because Josh Sacco. Act first, think later.’
I shook my head. ‘Even by his standards this feels . . . impulsive.’
‘Impulsive is his middle name.’
‘It’s actually Carmine, but, yes, exactly.’
‘I’m happy I could be the one to break the news to you that Josh is causing trouble before we’ve even started shooting.’
‘Thank you for giving me this gift,’ I said, with a smile. ‘But the thing is, I don’t want it to be like this. I don’t want to be proved right about him over and over again. Just once, I want him to surprise me by acting like he takes this job as seriously as I do.’
‘Babe, no one takes it as seriously as you do.’ Courtney nudged me.
‘Anyway, gotta go, Wigmaster General wants to see me. I may have turned my hair into a tennis ball but that doesn’t matter when you wear a wig!
Zero extra work for anyone to deal with!
’ Courtney bounced off to the hair and makeup department, and I went off looking for Josh and the troublemaking tattoo.
Before I managed to locate him, Tommy and Max came barrelling into me at high speed. ‘Josh’s tattoo is fucking sick,’ Max reported, eyes wide with enthusiasm.
‘Yeah, you’re gonna hate it!’ Tommy chuckled.
‘Give me a chance to see it first,’ I sighed.
‘He’s that way.’ Tommy pointed towards craft services, the area with an endless supply of food and drink for the cast and crew. Likely place for Josh to be if he was on set, but I have to say, I was surprised he was on set. I assumed he’d still be in bed.
As the two of them had informed me, Josh was in conversation with Jamila, one of the camera operators, by craft services.
The way things are set up when we’re filming in a studio means there are actually not that many places that actors – especially main cast like Josh and I – can really ‘mingle’ with crew or cast members who aren’t our specific friends.
We’re always cocooned in our trailers, assistants bringing us our coffees, dressers bringing our costumes, hiding out in our heated E-Z UP tents between takes when there’s not enough time to go back to our trailers.
But everyone passes through craft services.
It’s just a catering tent, really, but it exists outside of normal mealtimes and you can get coffee or drinks or snacks or whatever.
It’s a good place to scope out what’s going on in different departments or pick up gossip.
Josh glanced over his shoulder for a second and there I was, just staring at him like a creep. I looked away, pretending I was looking for something in my bag, rummaging long enough that by the time I looked back up he should be deep in conversation again but . . .
‘Hey, Squirt.’ He had instantly appeared by my side, his skin tinged with queasy grey and his eyes bleary and pink. Not quite the dashing male lead of Wonderwick just yet.
‘Hello, Josh. A little worse for wear?’
‘You could say that,’ he said. ‘I assume you stuck to water? Or are you more of a Shirley Temple girl? Remind me.’ Despite the hangover, a sparkle appeared in his eye at the prospect of making fun of me.
‘I had a drink. But I know when to stop if I have work the next day.’ If he wanted to play the bad boy, I was perfectly happy to play the good girl.
Josh refused to take the bait. ‘It was a fun party, huh?’
I felt a knot of anxiety form in my stomach thinking about last night, about the Darcy ambush, about all the feelings it stirred up in me, about her and Josh leaving together. ‘Yes, it was nice to see everyone again.’
‘You’ll be sick of the sight of them in no time.’ His voice was hoarse and his energy less exuberant than usual. He was chewing slowly on a pain au raisin, his square jaw working away at it. ‘These are pretty good. I think they’ve changed catering companies.’
‘I thought you swore by one of your mysterious green juices for a hangover?’
‘Already had it. This is the main course, and then I’m going to go scrounging for dessert.’
‘It’s half past six in the morning, I don’t know how you do it.’
‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way, my friend. I thought I was going to die on the ride here, I had to have the window open the whole way and stick my head out like a dog.’
‘And did you . . .’ I said, nonchalantly. It was remarkable how hard acting could be when you were trying to do it in your own life rather than as a job. ‘Did you come alone?’
A lazy smile crept across his face. ‘Montgomery, what the hell kind of question is that?’
‘I was just making conversation!’ I said, as innocently as I could manage.
‘Well you can nip that in the bud.’
‘Oh?’
‘You’re as bad as the damn tabloids! Just because we left the party at the same time it doesn’t mean we went home together. Anyway, why would it matter if we did?’
‘It wouldn’t! I assure you.’
‘You’re just being nosy, aren’t ya?’ He was definitely more lively now than at the beginning of the conversation.
It seemed that my failed attempt to extract information from him was helping him shake off his hangover.
‘Don’t want anyone to know about your private life, whatever it may be, but you want to know all about your old pal Josh. Am I right?’
I was about to leap to my own defence when the sound of animated conversation punctured the room.
‘Well, it’s cold, so I don’t know what to tell you,’ came Darcy’s voice. She was holding a coffee cup and speaking in that trademark drawl, which somehow managed to make it sound even more menacing, as if she had all the time in the world to toy with this junior employee.
‘I’m s-s-sorry, Darcy,’ stammered a runner who looked absolutely terrified.
‘Either it was cold when you got it for me or you stood around chatting to your little friends for such a long time that it went cold. Which is it?’
‘I’m . . .’ She swallowed, trying to figure out the right answer. ‘I’m sure it was hot when I poured it.’
‘So you were just wasting time between getting it and bringing it to me? Is that right?’ Her face was hard, her eyes narrow and sharp.
‘No, no, it’s not that!’ the runner protested.
Other people had started tuning into the conversation by this point, eyes shifting towards the two of them.