Living the Role

It was 5:30 PM, and Seventh Pictures was still working. The short trouble with Billy was behind them and the rest of that scene was filmed, and now Ronan and the cast were onto the last of Episode 1.

Elijah and Rose reach the Province of New York. He has no papers on him, nothing to say who he is or where he came from, and the men at the landing won’t pass him through. Rose speaks for him. Then she goes a step further and takes him on as her bodyguard.

The episode ends with Elijah stopped on the dock, looking out at old New York.

Ronan held the fascination in his eyes, in how slowly he turned his head, in the way he stopped walking without meaning to. Nothing about it looked worked out in advance. He was seeing the city.

Henry ran the playback once, then ran it again, then ran it a third time and still hadn’t stopped smiling at the monitor.

Henry put a hand up until the floor went quiet.

"Alright everybody, that’s our last shot on Episode 1, which means we are done shooting the first episode." The grin got away from him halfway through it. "And let’s be honest about who put it there, because it sure wasn’t me sitting back at the monitor all day. Thank you, all of you, I mean that."

The cast and crew let out a short cheer, most of them too tired for much more than that. Jane stayed where she was, hands folded, taking it in without moving.

"Go get some dinner and take your time over it, I don’t want to see anybody eating standing up at the table again." Henry was already turning to take in the rest of them. "When we come back we’ve got the night stuff for Episode 2, and it’s a short list, so nobody’s going to be here till midnight. Then you all go home and actually sleep."

Nobody argued with that.

Finishing an episode didn’t mean anybody got to ease off. The celebrating came when the series wrapped, and not before. On top of which, Episode 1 was going to air long before the production was done with the rest of it.

NBS was not going to wait for the whole series to be finished. Episode 1 would air while the cast was still shooting the later ones, with only four or five finished episodes ready ahead of it. And if not many people watched those first nights, the network moved fast. New shows were taken off the air after two or three episodes, and whatever was left of them was either aired late at night when almost nobody was watching, or never aired at all.

So the pressure sat heavy on everyone, Jane Kingsley’s name attached or not.

Ronan was new to all of it and he felt it the same as the rest of them. Jane’s share of it included.

Henry came over to him with the grin still hanging around. "Kid, you were good today, and I don’t mean good for a first time out, I mean good. Front to back, the whole episode." His hand landed on Ronan’s shoulder and stayed there. "So don’t go getting comfortable on me now, because I need eleven more of those out of you."

It was a fair thing to want. Some actors turned in everything they had for Episode 1 and then went slack once the novelty wore off, and the show carried the drop for the rest of its run. If Ronan held his level all the way through, the odds of the network cutting them off got a lot longer.

"You’ll get them," Ronan said. "I’m not going to coast just because the first one’s done, and if I’m honest I’d rather be better than this by the time we finish."

Henry clapped him on the arm. "Now that’s what I like to hear."

They talked a while longer, and then Henry made for craft service.

Ronan hadn’t been selling him anything. Only an idiot could fail at this job with the «Immersion System» behind him. The standing sets on the backlot were dressed beautifully, period down to the door hinges, and they still weren’t in the same conversation as what [Full-Immersion] put in front of his eyes.

’Alright, food,’ he thought. ’Let me go see what crafty’s put out.’

The craft service table ran long and was loaded end to end, cast and crew already at it, eating standing up, sitting on apple boxes, wherever they’d landed.

’Hm. That’s steak I’m smelling.’ He had it before he had it in sight. ’Heh. So they actually went and did it. I ask for one thing this morning and crafty comes through.’

He’d asked for it that morning, craving a steak and half certain nothing would come of it. It had taken him until the fifth day just to work up the nerve, because back when he was an extra a request like that wasn’t something he’d have dreamed of making. And here it was anyway.

He took a tray and worked down the line. Steak, eggs, bread, broccoli, whatever else fit on the plate. Coffee at the end.

Then he carried the tray outside to the round table by his trailer. NBS had put that trailer there for him. Another one that came with not being an extra anymore, because extras got a folding chair under a pop-up if they were lucky, and leads got their name on a door.

Five days of eating out here now, and it still hadn’t worn off: his own table, his own company, nobody needing anything from him.

He got into the steak while it was still hot. ’So good. This is almost the same as what you’d get at the good restaurants in town.’ He chuckled at that.

The coffee went down after it, and some of the day’s tiredness went with it.

Then somebody came toward him across the lot.

Jane Kingsley.

He wasn’t surprised. She did this some mornings over breakfast, some afternoons over lunch, the two of them working through the scenes they carried together.

She set her tray down across from him and sat.

"You’re in a good mood." She looked him over with a small smile. "Everybody spent the last hour telling you how good you were. Is that what’s doing it?"

"Who wouldn’t be?" He tipped his fork at the plate in front of him. "It’s not only that, though. The food out here is incredible."

She laughed at that. "It is. And whatever else you want to say about NBS, and they can be petty when it suits them, they do feed their people properly."

Then she picked up her coffee and drank before she’d touched anything on the plate.

"You know that’s strange, right?" He watched her do it. "Coffee first. Every single time, before you’ve eaten a thing."

He’d been noticing it since rehearsals. Never the food, always the cup.

She lifted the cup an inch off the table, like that settled the matter. "What do you want me to say? Coffee’s life. Ask any actor you like and you’ll get the same answer out of them."

He couldn’t argue with her there. Ten hours a day was the light version of it, twelve when the day went long, roughly seven in the morning to seven at night. And the next block was flipping over entirely, six in the evening to six in the morning, because the scenes coming up wouldn’t sit right in daylight.

She set the cup down. "I want to ask you something."

He knew where this was going before she got there. "Heh. Let me guess. My acting again?"

The cup stopped halfway back up. "...Right. How did you know that?"

"Because you’re predictable." He looked straight at her as he said it. "Every time we sit down, it’s my acting. That’s all you ever want to talk about."

Her ears went red before the rest of her caught up. "So that’s what I am to you? Simple. Easy to read."

"I didn’t say that," he said.

She pressed her lips together, then put her fork into the steak with rather more force than the steak required.

He drank his coffee and let the teasing go. "What did you want to ask?"

Her cheeks were still faintly pink when she said it. "How did you do it?"

"Do what?"

"You know exactly what." Her eyes stayed on him. "Billy. You pulled him so far into that scene that he went down on the floor because he believed you’d shot him."

Then he had it. "Ah. I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t know I could do that to somebody I’m working with. It caught me as much as it caught him."

Which wasn’t a lie, not really. He hadn’t known the «Immersion System» had anything like the [Full-Immersion Effect] in it. Finding out had shaken him more than he’d let on to anyone.

"So you weren’t even trying." She worked it through out loud. "You were just convincing enough that somewhere in the middle of it you put the idea in his head that the gun was real, and after that you’d more or less hypnotized him into feeling the rest of it himself."

He stared at her. "What?"

Her eyes went wide, and she came forward over the table like she’d caught something out. "Are you a hypnotist?"

He had nothing. Of all the places she could have taken it, he hadn’t seen that one coming.

She waited him out. "I’m right, aren’t I?"

He put the fork down. "Jane. I’m nineteen years old. When exactly was I supposed to have found the time to learn hypnosis? Doing what happened out there on purpose would take somebody years."

Then he went back to his food. "Call it luck. I got lucky with the take, that’s the whole of it."

She studied him a while longer, taking a bite of the steak without hurrying over it. "Hm. I suppose you did."

She said it easily enough. She also didn’t look like a woman who’d stopped wondering.

He glanced across the table at her and had a thought he couldn’t do anything with.

’Elise would lose her mind if she knew. Jane Kingsley, sitting here asking me about my acting like it’s worth asking about.’

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