Hollywood's Secret Baby

I look between Sarah and Cory. She’s holding a Bloody Mary, beads of condensation running down the glass between her fingers.

“Let’s get down to it then,” I say.

Her face is scrunched up in confusion until she realizes that by ‘getting down to it, I mean learning how to act with my personal tutor.

Which is her.

“Of course! In all this fuss I forgot the reason I came over here wasn’t just to make drinks. I need to get you ready for the cameras.”

“So where are we going to do this?”

“We’ll get started right here with the practical lesson. Then it’s off to do some field work.”

“Field work?”

“Don’t look so distressed,” she says with a light laugh. “There won’t be any test at the end of this. Acting isn’t about passing and failing. It isn’t so scientific that it can be graded like that. It’s an art, and as such, you must become an artist. And the first step to being an artist is being one. Not acting like one.”

“So to be an actor, I shouldn’t act?”

Sarah looks to Cory. “She is a fast learner.”

I can’t tell if she’s being serious or sarcastic, but I’m leaning towards the former, as Sarah has never been anything but unusually kind towards me. And after learning her story, I try to see past the fame to the very real woman she is.

“But then how do I act?”

“You act by becoming and doing. Your goal should never be to say the right line as you in character; it should be for the character to say the line. Think of it as being possessed.”

I nod at this like it’s a golden nugget of truth, but in truth I’m not sure what she means. Say the line as the character in you? Before I can begin to unwrap this mystic statement, there’s something bigger I need to know. “Who is my character, anyway?”

“Didn’t I give you the script?”

He did that first night, but I didn’t make it five pages in before falling asleep. Every day since then has been so action-packed that I haven’t even thought to pick it up and read through it.

“You did…” I say and retrieve the bound papers that have been hiding under one of my old shirts on the coffee table. I don’t mean to be so messy, but there has been little time for laundry and even less to be reading a script. “Things have been a bit busy.”

“It’s a suspense drama,” Cory explains as I flip the script open to the first page. “You’re playing the part of a prostitute who’s carved out a life that works for you. You have a driver you trust, a friend in the business (played by Sarah), and a comfortable set of regular clients. All of this comes crashing down when Sarah’s character is found dead, tied to a bed in a hotel. You go on a mission to uncover what happened to her, but along the way, you learn that this isn’t a one-off. You end up uncovering a ring of crime at the very bottom, where users on Darkweb sites pay to watch people killed or raped.”

“Sounds dark,” I say.

“This is the sort of movie that a lot of critics call an Academy Award grab,” Sarah adds in helpfully.

“But,” Cory cuts in to say, “these sorts of movies are a gamble. This isn’t a summer blockbuster where we’re pretty much guaranteed to make the money back. There’s the real possibility that this will crash and burn.”

I’ve read through to the second page by now, which is where the first sex scene begins. “How many nude scenes do I have?” I ask with a cringe.

“Three,” Cory says immediately, like he knew this was going to be my next question. “If you count the montage at the beginning as only one. One of those will be with me. Cost-cutting measures and all that.”

I bite my lips at this. At least that will make one of them easier.

“One of those is a full-frontal scene,” Sarah says.

“Two actually,” Cory adds.

“Oh.” That’s all I can manage to get out. Cory mentioned a nude scene before. I didn’t know the extent of it.

“We can rewrite the script if you’re uncomfortable,” Sarah offers, but with the strained way Cory looks over at her, I don’t think it will be as easy as she makes out.

“I can handle it,” I say, never having believed my own words less. I couldn’t even go up to the top of the bungee jumping tower a few years back during a company outing, so how am I ever going to work up the courage to get naked in front of the camera? And re-enact believable sex on top of that?