Читать книгу Who’s That Girl?: A laugh-out-loud sparky romcom! - Mhairi McFarlane, Mhairi McFarlane - Страница 17

It was strange to get to know someone through their press before meeting them, but Edie guessed it had been a while since Elliot had met anyone who hadn’t met him in print first.

What was that quote about Paul Newman, something about, ‘He was as nice as you could expect for a man who hadn’t heard the word “no” for twenty-five years’?

The photogenically brooding Elliot Owen couldn’t have heard the word no for at least five now. From women, possibly ever.

His bio details weren’t very colourful. He was thirty-one, not twenty-five, as Richard had said. Same age as Meg, though he’d been busier. Born to a comfortably middle-class family in the leafy Nottingham suburb of West Bridgford, went to a state school with a better OFSTED score than Edie’s, joined a local TV drama workshop, got spotted by a scout. He moved to London and ended up in a boring medical drama, did a bit of time in a soap, and a very quickly canned sitcom.

He was the love interest in a video by a terrible American emo-rock band for a song called ‘Crumple Zone’, which was a huge hit in the States and got his face known. It landed his breakout role in Blood & Gold.

As Prince Wulfroarer in the epic and boisterous fantasy series known for its stabbing, shouting, tits, scheming and tits, he was suddenly ‘sex in a wolf pelt’. A swaggering, high-born Northern warlord – rallying cry; ‘For the Blades of My Brothers!’ – he fell in love with a servant girl called Malleflead. Sadly that had proved his undoing, as Count Bragstard had also set his Machiavellian sights on her.

Prince Wulfy had therefore died on the end of a pointy weapon at the end of last series, uttering the heartbreaking words to his distraught shag-piece, before he bit on the fake blood capsule: ‘I am my Kingdom’ (his catchphrase), ‘but I would sacrifice it all for you.’ His demise prompted much speculation about whether female viewers would desert in droves.

Edie was resigned to Elliot being at best, boring, and at worst, an obnoxious brat. The fact the last ghost-writer had exited immediately was a very bad sign.

She didn’t think this expectation was prejudice on her part, it was straightforward logic. Take one male ego, rain down this much attention, employ someone whose sole job it was to blast his armpits with a hairdryer, and so on. Pay him millions, spooge a luge of adoration all over him. To come through that and not be an arsehole would take someone of spectacular character. Which meant you were gambling on a man not only being given his physical gifts, but also bestowed with Gandhi-esque substance.

You might as well pop down to the shop on the corner and expect your lotto ticket to pay off your mortgage.

Edie leafed through the photos of him on set in whichever raggedy-beautiful Eastern European country doubled for ‘Easterport’ or ‘Goldendale’. (Edie hadn’t seen much of Blood & Gold and could never keep the fictional geography straight.)

Elliot’s dark brown, slightly curly hair was dyed boot-polish black for Blood & Gold, and he wore dragon-green contact lenses. He had one of those squared-off jaws that a draughtsman could draw with three swipes of the pencil, and full lips that Edie envied, they were the sort she’d always wanted.

It was obvious why he’d been such a hit. It wasn’t sensible or interesting good looks, in Edie’s humble opinion. It was silly-to-the-point-of-ridiculous, pin-up handsomeness, to appeal to teenagers who hadn’t developed a more complex palate yet. The sexiness equivalent of strawberry milkshake.

She remembered Charlotte and others in her office all swooning and sighing over Elliot Owen, and Edie saying, ‘Meh, looks like the one in the TRAINEE BARISTA T-shirt who makes your cappuccino sour and gritty’, and Jack laughing in approval. Then Jack repeated the rumours he ‘played for Man City, not Man U’ and all the women chorused nooooooooo.

Edie had best buckle down to this homework – she also had a stack of celeb auto biogs, and they made drear reading – so she didn’t give him an excuse to kick off when she fumbled a question to which there was a well-known answer.

She’d start with a recent Sunday supplement profile. She flipped past moodily blue photos of Elliot resting his forehead on his forearm, with an expression as if he’d just been given terrible news. Headline: FANTASY CHAMPION.

It’s considered good manners to dip your headlights, at night, so as not to dazzle the oncoming traffic. When Elliot Owen strides casually into the dramatically under lit environs of the hip East Village restaurant he chose for our meeting, you can’t help wonder if he wishes he could flip his full beam off, at will. As he asks the waitresses for his table, they virtually crash and burn in the blazing glare.

Jesus wept, seriously?!

Raymond Chandler once described a ‘blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window’. In the 21st century, Owen’s a brunette who could leave a nunnery in smoking ruins.

Yes, that’s how religion works, Edie thought, nuns simply haven’t met sufficiently fit men and so married the Son of God as a fallback. These people.

With effortless good manners, Elliot inquires what I’m drinking. ‘Diet Coke, right?’ He summons the waitress, who is caught still staring at us. If Elliot’s noticed, he doesn’t let on: an old-fashioned gentleman, under the modern-casual shirt and jeans. ‘Can we have a Diet Coke, and which beers do you have?’ The waitress almost trembles as she offers Budweiser. ‘Ah, not a big fan of Budweiser. Clearly not spent enough time here yet,’ he says, with that sleepily devastating smile, as the waitress almost ovulates. ‘But that will be fine.’ And where is ‘here’? America, or the spotlight he’s now occupying? He’s seemingly come from nowhere … ‘Or Nottingham, as we like to call it,’ he corrects me, sharp as a tack. There’s that impossibly disarming smile again.

Christ, this is some hardcore drivel, Edie thought. Man In Ordering Beverage Shocker. He’s just a person who has to poo like the rest of us. Also, is that a dig at Nottingham? She flared with indignation, which was a bit hypocritical, she realised.

New York has its fair share of celebrities and its most fashionable inhabitants are well trained in ignoring the famous. But Elliot Owen is so white hot right now, even those who aren’t looking over at us are still looking.

How exactly do you look and NOT look at the same time? Edie wanted the female journalist to show her working. She was also curious how you show someone to their table in the style of a crashing car. Or ‘almost’ ovulate.

The reason, of course, is Blood & Gold, the fantasy series that sparked many a female fantasy about its heroic, flawed, tragic lead, Prince Wulfroarer. With Byronic looks that could unlace a bodice at thirty paces, Owen bestrode the pitiless landscape of the ‘Eight Islands’ like a warrior Heathcliff, spliced with Mr Darcy. And like Mr Darcy, had his cold, proud heart melted by a woman of inferior class. In the hands of a lesser actor, the Prince might’ve been a …

Oh God, enough, Edie thought and started skimming. Right, here was a bit about the Nottingham series.

The world is Owen’s oyster right now, yet he makes it clear that he’s not interested in the low-hanging fruit of decorative roles. His first job, since hanging up Wulfroarer’s armour, is a relatively low-budget gritty thriller set in his native Nottingham, called Gun City.

Written and directed by Archie Puce, the enfant terrible of British drama who made a splash with his BAFTA-winning science fiction film INTERREGNUM, Puce is notorious for pushing actors to their limit, and giving studios, and the media, hell.

Both Owen and his US co-star, Greta Alan, are taking a huge pay cut to be part of Gun City, as the two detectives unravelling the mystery behind a young woman’s corpse, found spread-eagled and naked in a fountain in the middle of the town centre on Christmas Day.

‘When Archie got in touch, I was thrilled,’ Elliot says. ‘Everyone wants to impress people who are hard to impress and Archie is very much in that category. When he explained the thinking behind Gun City, examining the real law-and-order problems facing the region, I knew I wouldn’t be able to live with someone else taking this role. Not least because it’s my stamping ground. It’s great to spend some time at home.’

Edie shouldn’t be rankled, but the whole thing irritated her. As if the city was going to be grateful for rich ex-pat Elliot Owen giving it lots of publicity as a crime-ridden grot hole.

The rest of the cuttings didn’t live up to the swooning hagiography of the Sunday magazine piece. The papers and women’s glossies were mainly interested in the fact Elliot was dating a hot British actress called Heather Lily. (Two flowers? Impossibly fragrant.) They featured together in recent paparazzi pictures in New York; Elliot in that very self-conscious ‘off-duty’ outfit of no-doubt hideously expensive binman’s style donkey jacket and artfully battered brown boots, carrying Starbucks cups. His blonde girlfriend only a perfect Dairylea triangle nose peeking through a bundle of thick blonde hair, with a tiny sphere-of-fluff dog on a lead bouncing behind her. Why did starlets always have dogs? Maybe it was the pissy cat lady stigma.

Hmm, Edie conceded the angle of Elliot’s jaw was caught nicely in photo number five, as he stepped out to hail a yellow cab. She caught herself getting sucked into the whirlpool of trivia and thought, you really had to wonder at a society that was fascinated by couple buy coffee.

She put the cuttings back inside the envelope and laid back on her bed. Her dad had yet to find the funds or the will to fix the damp problem at the back of the house, so the off-white walls in this back room sagged and bloated like a wedding cake that had been left out in the rain. The ghostly remnants of her teenage self filled it, from the greasy blots left by Blu- Tack on the walls, to shreds of ripped-off stickers (the New Kids on the Block phase.)

Edie was once obsessed with glow-in-the-dark stickers, peppering her navy-blue bedroom ceiling with a constellation of white-green paper stars, crescent moons and comets.

She lay in her bed and stared at the universe on her ceiling in the late afternoon murk. Edie used to lie there thinking what a big world it was and how, one day, she was going to strike out into it.

That had gone well.