Chapter Twenty-Five
Filming Orientations was like a gorgeous dream.
Every day I felt like I was pushing myself a bit further, learning more about myself as an actress outside of Wonderwick.
Learning that, actually, I was pretty good at this job.
Since it was being shot using natural light, we were operating on days that began and ended earlier than most of us were used to.
I loved acting with Ben, too, and found the way he slid seamlessly from Ben to The Man kind of magic.
I was like Linderley Jones, which was part of the reason I got the role in the first place, but it meant ‘real acting’ always impressed me.
Now I had to do it myself, and found both Ben and Lucy Lennon inspiring people to be around.
‘The words feel right but you don’t quite look right . . .’ Lucy said, chewing on her thumbnail as we rehearsed a scene. It was a two-hander so we could go through it on our own, and we’d found ourselves a corner of walled garden where no one would disturb us.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, keen to understand.
I felt like I was learning something new from Lucy every day just by being around her.
On Wonderwick, there seemed to be this divide between ‘the children’ and ‘the adults’, going all the way back to the first film.
We were left to our own devices and the adults clustered together in E-Z Ups without us, and certainly never socialised with us.
I tried to forget those divisions and remember that Lucy almost certainly didn’t see me as ‘one of the children’, so I didn’t want to put the idea in her head.
I wanted her to think of us as artistic equals, albeit two people with vastly different amounts of experience.
‘I feel like there’s a disconnect between what you’re saying and doing, and I’m wondering if that’s deliberate?’ she asked. ‘It’s not a criticism at all, I’m just trying to explore your intention.’
No one had wanted to explore my intention with me before.
That wasn’t really something we did on Wonderwick.
Lucy and I tried the scene ten different ways, seeing which felt the most natural in our bodies with all the knowledge we had about the characters, the dialogue and what Edgar seemed to want from us. It was thrilling.
I knew Josh was filming an action movie set on a submarine, and I wondered how far his acting skills were being pushed, if at all.
I wanted him to know what it felt like to work in this way, how satisfying it was to try and fail and try again and try differently and just keep trying.
I remembered what I’d said to him in my embarrassing outburst at the river.
The thing I’d asked him to do was try. I felt like I was trying non-stop on Orientations.
Finally, after running the lines twenty or more times, I felt something unlock inside me. I knew I’d figured out the tone, the gestures, the eye contact. I just knew.
‘That’s the one!’ Lucy grinned at me, her mass of red curls piled haphazardly on her head. ‘Don’t you think?’
I nodded, barely able to contain an equally manic grin myself. ‘It felt right. I think we’ve nailed it.’
‘You’ve nailed it,’ she said, resolutely.
‘I absolutely couldn’t have done it without you. I love working with you,’ I said, shaking my head in disbelief as we walked back towards the unit base where everyone was breaking for lunch.
I spotted Ben deep in conversation with Edgar, the two of them walking together, Ben’s head bowed as he listened.
Ben was often with Edgar, talking endlessly about the script and the role, trying to refine his performance with a diligence that I have to say I found very hot.
When Ben looked up, spotting me, his eyes lit up and my stomach did a tiny little backflip.
I tried to keep the smile off my face at the sight of his soft gold hair and sharp cheekbones in the warm midday sun.
Finally, the two of them finished their conversation and Ben strolled over towards me, his hands in the pockets of his trousers. ‘Hello, you. I was wondering if you wanted to get dinner tonight?’
‘Just me and you?’ I asked, the thought suddenly feeling a little bit real and intimidating.
He shrugged. ‘Sure, that’s what I was thinking. Is that a horrible idea? I thought we were . . . mutually interested.’
‘Oh, no, we totally are,’ I said, although I’d started to wonder if I really wanted to see this plan through.
Even though I knew things were never going to happen with Josh, it still felt oddly disloyal to him .
. . but if it was all just for show, a dinner out in Galway wasn’t the worst thing in the world, was it?
Ben was so unlike Josh in so many ways that it probably would be the ideal way to get my mind off him.
‘Great, we can head in after we wrap.’ A satisfied smile spread across his face as he tossed his floppy hair out of his eyes.
The rest of the afternoon I put my hard work with Lucy to good use and tried not to think too much about my dinner with Ben
‘Today was a lot, wasn’t it?’ Ben asked over dinner at an Italian restaurant that evening. We’d barely made it through a quarter of a page of dialogue in the afternoon.
‘We got there in the end! And I think having to do it over and over again helped me to really understand what was happening. I don’t think I’d understood when I read it on the page that she doesn’t actually mean any of what she’s saying in that scene.
I just took for granted she thought she was telling the truth. ’
‘That’s because you’re pure of heart,’ Ben said, squeezing my knee under the table.
I gasped a little in surprise at how forward he was being, especially in public, but kept having to remind myself that this was kind of the whole point!
To be seen! ‘That was OK, right?’ he murmured to me over the table.
I nodded, feeling my pulse quicken. He gazed at me, deep in thought for a moment. ‘I just can’t get over your eyes . . .’ My heart leaped, this was surely the precursor to something extremely romantic. ‘They really freak me out!’
Oh.
I blinked, wrong-footed. ‘Well, that’s what I’m working with.’
‘I don’t mean in a bad way!’ he insisted. ‘They’re just intense, that’s all.’ He held up a hand to cover my right eye, the blue one, and then the other to cover my left eye, the brown one. ‘I wonder what you’d look like if they were both the same colour.’
Not that I’d have known what to say to that anyway but I didn’t have to answer because we noticed a couple a few tables down whispering to each other and glancing in our direction.
We waved at them and they laughed, a little embarrassed about being obvious, before asking if they could take a selfie with us.
Once they’d returned to their table, Ben gasped.
‘I can’t believe we haven’t discussed the news of the day,’ he said, his eyes wide with delight.
I furrowed my brow, trying to figure out what he meant. ‘What’s that?’
‘Haven’t you seen?’
‘Seen what?’
‘Well, you know how Evan Cole just came out?’ he said, referencing a young, handsome Hollywood star that had announced his relationship with a man via Instagram the day before.
I nodded. ‘Howard Hunt did this deranged post about how America needs fewer boys like Evan Cole and more very fine young men like Josh Sacco,’ Ben laughed and shook his head.
Howard Hunt was the Republican presidential candidate and was famous for making deranged pronouncements on things that had nothing to do with either himself or the presidency.
‘Being called a very fine young man! By Howard Hunt! Can you imagine anything less dignified?!’ Ben was almost hooting with amusement.
‘Oh God.’ I grimaced. ‘Poor Josh.’
‘I’d be mortified if I thought I appealed to a man like him,’ Ben said, knocking back the last of his wine. ‘Shall we head home?’
‘I think so, it’s been a long old day,’ I told him, as I turned over my worries about Josh’s PR situation in my head.
Ben paid, and I quickly fired off a text to Josh saying I was sorry that he’d got dragged into this whole mess, but that I knew he would handle it right.
As we walked back to the hotel, hands brushing against each other’s, I couldn’t help feeling awful for Josh.
It was one thing to be in the news for things you’d done, but it was another to get unwillingly dragged into a story by some maniac with bad politics and bad intentions.
When we got back to the hotel, we paused on the landing outside our rooms. ‘That was nice, thank you for suggesting it,’ I said, feeling at exactly the same time a spark of attraction to the person I was staring at and the profound hope that he wasn’t going to invite me into his room.
After a much-needed night’s sleep, very much alone, I woke to a text from Courtney.
OMG! Have you seen this?! I’m kind of obsessed?
With a link to a news article. Overcoming my natural suspicion that it was some kind of spam, I clicked the link. It was a news story about Josh, responding to what Howard Hunt had said, with an embedded video.
I clicked ‘play’, and there was Josh, sitting lazily in a chair across from Stacey Holmes, an entertainment reporter I had met before. ‘So, Josh,’ she asked, ‘what do you think of Howard Hunt calling you “a very fine young man”? Is he someone whose approval you seek?’
Without even pausing for breath, without even thinking, Josh said, ‘Howard Hunt is a fucking fascist and he needs to keep my name out of his mouth.’ My hand flew to my mouth in delight.
Not that I would expect Josh to roll over and pretend he enjoyed this endorsement by the presidential candidate, but I didn’t necessarily expect him to go nuclear, either.
I would expect a combination of his parents and his team would have constructed some delicate, slippery response that wouldn’t ruffle anyone’s feathers, let alone those of the potential future president of America.
‘That’s pretty strong, isn’t it?’ Stacey asked, fishing for more from Josh.
Josh just flashed her a smile, shrugged his shoulders and crossed his legs, sitting even further back in the chair, even more relaxed.
‘Just my opinion, Stacey. Pretty sure we still have the right to free speech in this country, don’t we?
He can say I’m a fine young man and I can call him a fucking fascist. And I can also say that I think Evan Cole is a prince, and braver than Howard Hunt will ever be. ’
‘So you think Howard Hunt is a fascist?’
‘If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck . . .’ He threw his hands up in submission.
‘It’s probably a fascist fucking duck, Stacey.
Anyway, I thought we were here to talk about movies, not politics.
Don’t be pulling the old switcheroo on me,’ he said, roguish grin on his face so powerful that it clearly disarmed her. And then the clip ended.
I watched the clip again, this time with a greater sense of pleasure because I knew what was coming.
I felt a swell of pride fill my chest. I knew the kind of pressure we were under to remain apolitical, and there was almost no one in the cast you would have expected this of less than Josh, someone who had shown almost no interest in anything contentious, never really expressed even the mildest political opinion, barely even did the standard celebrity ‘Register to vote!’-style content.
When I scrolled to the bottom of the article, the comments were predictably divisive.
Some along the lines of ‘he’s right and he should say it’, ‘finally a celebrity with a backbone’, ‘I’ve always thought he seemed like a smart young man’, but also more than a few suggesting he was a traitor, should be shot, was an ungrateful bastard, that he was part of the liberal Hollywood Illuminati, that his parents were trying to control the White House, that he should be shipped off to fight a foreign war to toughen him up, and on and on and on.
I replied to Courtney:
Good for him
I thought this shoot would be a Wonderwick-free zone. Or did I mean a Josh Sacco-free zone? But that was an impossible dream. Just because filming Wonderwick had ended, it didn’t mean I was ever really free of it. The universe and everyone in it was just too big a cultural force. It was everywhere.
Ben and I had the same call time so shared a car to set that morning. ‘Gosh.’ Ben looked up from his phone when we were nearing the abbey, a bemused smile on his face. ‘Your old pal Josh has really put his foot in it, hasn’t he?’
I liked Ben. He was handsome, talented, fun to hang out with. I fancied him and I respected him. But there was always this sense of distance between us when it came to Wonderwick . . . or maybe just when it came to Josh.
‘I feel like you’re saying he didn’t mean to say what he said in the interview?’ I ventured, cautiously.
‘And you think he did mean to?’ He frowned at me as if the idea hadn’t crossed his mind.
‘Yes, I do, actually. I think he probably felt really embarrassed and angry when Howard Hunt said that about him, and he thought about it and he decided that was how he wanted to respond.’ I had criticised Josh myself in the past for not thinking things through, but this wasn’t exactly the heat of the moment.
‘It’s not going to do much for his career, though, is it?’
‘Some things are more important than our careers,’ I said, feeling irritation rise in my chest. I knew that I sounded both naive and preachy, but I meant it.
To him this was evidence of Josh’s immaturity and impulsivity.
To me it was proof that he wasn’t just a brainless Hollywood puppet, that he had a backbone and wasn’t going to roll over to please the man who was likely to be the next US president.
I liked Ben, but he didn’t get Josh. I could talk shit about Josh Sacco, but Ben couldn’t.
‘You really think that?’ A smile danced on his lips.
‘Yes.’
‘That surprises me. You’ve always seemed so sensible.’
I shrugged. ‘I guess there’s more to Emily Montgomery than sensible.’ I hoped we didn’t have to talk about Josh anymore. For someone that seemed to dislike him, Ben brought him up an awful lot.