Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 123873 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 619(@200wpm)___ 495(@250wpm)___ 413(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 123873 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 619(@200wpm)___ 495(@250wpm)___ 413(@300wpm)
Brendan narrowed his eyes. “I can fit every type. I’ve played nobility before.”
“When you were fifteen, twenty years younger. That ‘Prince of Romance’ crown is getting a little tarnished and shabby, my friend.” Drake elbowed him lightly. “Look. At your age, and with the heroine herself being Chinese, you were Hollywood’s best fit to play her handsome, domineering, loud, arrogant, brash, mouthy, irritating, controlling, overly blunt, meddlesome, demanding, assholeish—”
“I don’t think you’re describing the character,” Brendan said flatly.
“Don’t you?” Drake asked with utmost innocence; the corners of his mouth struggled and twitched. “Anyway, you’re still the best fit for the father. You hit the right age range, and they wanted someone hot for the attractive villain vibe.”
“…it says he’s sixty-five.” Brendan thrust the script under Drake’s nose, turned to the page with the introduction of the father character—Landon Cheng. “I’m only fifty-one.”
“Which is a Hollywood eighty, even though right now you’re acting like you’re eight, you spoiled, arrogant piece of shit.”
“He dies in the end,” Brendan growled, and pushed the spine of the script against Drake’s nose.
Drake flinched back with a hiss. “Villains usually do—give me that.”
Snatching the script from Brendan’s hand, Drake flipped through it in a quick fan of the pages, then let it fall closed on the blue cardstock cover, printed with the film’s working title: Heart of Snow. From what Brendan had heard the original title had been The Snow Princess; the story revolved around a young aristocratic woman, the daughter of an earl, who refused to thaw her heart for her many suitors. The heroine was meant to be the titular snow princess, but a last-minute title change had come down to avoid confusion with the old fairy tale of The Snow Queen.
The old title felt simpler; more classic.
But maybe that was just Brendan being old-fashioned.
Drake frowned, flipping the cover open again for another, slower look through. “You know,” he murmured, “I hear the guy they got is, ah, really popular with…well.”
“Just say it,” Brendan snarled.
“Don’t make me.”
“Say it.”
“God, why are all my clients such fucking—” Drake thudded his head back against the cushions and smacked the script down against his thighs, staring upward. “Fine. He’s popular with younger demographics. GenZ types. The ones who like WAP and ethereally pretty Korean boys. The ones who drive word of mouth. The ones who get your shit trending, and the whole world talks about it because they’re talking about it. What they like makes money, studios follow the money, and the money’s currently following Tell. He’s new, he’s fresh, and after a few successes on the indie circuit blew up into sleeper hits, people have been clamoring to see him in something with a major studio. It’s just how it happened, Brendan. You didn’t fail at anything. There’s just room for other people on the stage.”
Staring at Drake unblinkingly, Brendan just reached into his front shirt pocket.
Pulled out his phone.
Unlocked his screen.
And shoved it into Drake’s face with the results of Brendan’s last google query still in the topmost window: an image search for Cillian Tell, spitting back hundreds of thumbnails of a rangy man with deep, aesthetically hollowed cheekbones. His jaw was sharp yet borderline fragile, and it flirted with the tips of dark brown hair cut short in the back, long in the front, an artfully messy tangle whose curling tips had a love affair with Cillian Tell’s parted, sultry lips.
Tell wasn’t attractive, necessarily, at least not by conventional standards; his jaw was a little too wide for the rest of his face, his chin a little too pointed, the bridge of his nose erratic and asymmetrically bumpy, the angles of his face not quite fitting together right until a certain appealing awkwardness pulled the eye back for a second and third look. Not to mention he almost always dressed like a punk just off the street from a fight, ragged and torn denim with worn, tattered shirts and battered jackets.
But he was striking.
Brendan had to give him that.
That not-quite-rightness, all those little imperfections in denial of the modern airbrushed ideal of Hollywood beauty, seemed to segment his features until it was impossible not to linger on the pronounced soft dip of his upper lip, and the way it just slightly overhung the lower until it was an overripe fruit waiting to fall; on the way his mouth was almost too wide, the upper lip thinner but the lower lip full; the way the naturally red color of his mouth bled unevenly past the actual boundaries of his lips to give his mouth a kiss-swollen, bruised look. Luminous golden freckles spattered across Tell’s eyes and only his eyes, making a sort of raccoon’s mask and creating a captivating backdrop drawing focus to the odd, pale, creamy brown shade of his irises. His eyelashes swept outward at an angle to make him always look as if he’d been caught in the midst of a slow, drowsy blink, full of the suggestion of dark nights and tangled sheets.