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viggwigg · 5 years

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Pretty Faces | Chapter 1

Pairings: Tom Holland x Reader

Summary: You are a rising makeup artist whose talent is quickly taking off. When one of your closest friends happens to be a big-shot director, you get the gig of a lifetime working next to him and his crew. No one could ask for a better workspace when surrounded by people you already love. Just what happens when the biggest crush of your life walks onto the set, ready for his close up?

Disclaimer: Cursing

A/N: OOPSIES totally my bad. Got kinda busy and put this off until now. But here it is! 🤩

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SFX, beauty, costume, you name it. You had done it all. No makeup challenge had ever held you back from a 110% attempt on your part.

Even if you didn’t do so hot on your first try, you continued to perfect your technique with every opportunity you got. You had the kind of drive that inspired other artists to pull out their own strengths in their work. To take pride in their profession.

Not to mention your humble personality about your talent. In your eyes, your abilities were earned through blood, sweat, and tears.

With how much fun you had playing around with it, it just made sense to enter into entertainment. You didn’t mind using crappy written tv shows to jumpstart your career. Nothing really slowed you down in your mind.

From weddings to the Halloween photoshoots, your name circulated around L.A. in a slow burn. And then an all at once fire.

Your credibility doubled as multiple directors could vouch for your performance. It took a load off their shoulders seeing their actor’s bloody lip look completely real.

You were called on last-minute set emergencies with how reliable your skills were.

And when your buddy Jesse came to you with a job offer, you knew that you were at least somewhat qualified for what he would throw at you.

It’s not to say you weren’t shitting bricks, no, of course you were. However, you would have to admit to yourself that you were doing significantly better than when you started out.

Due to how highly acclaimed Jesse’s movies were, he never offered you a spot on his team in the past. It’s not to say that he wasn’t impressed in your work; he definitely believed you would become great. But he didn’t want to hand you a job without you having earned it first.

And with the last production you were a part of wrapped up, Jesse thought the timing couldn’t have been better.

He invited you to be an artist in his upcoming movie. Casting for the roles had just been finished and filming would commence within the month.

He had a devilish laugh when you curiously asked about the casting list, yet he wouldn’t budge and insisted that you had to wait like everyone else to find out.

Being the director’s best friend seemed to have little benefit at this point.

You rolled your eyes as you thought back to your conversation with him. If he was gonna be stingy with his information, you were going to be stingy with your kindness.

Currently, you were walking with a multitude of bagels and coffee in your arms, on your way to the meeting point. The makeup artists usually weren’t invited to the production meetings but today they were assigning departments and groups to certain divisions.

This was the first day that all crews and actors would see each other.

The treats you were bringing were for your fellow artists who you have met a couple times before today. You guys went over your individual techniques so that you could have a consistent result when the time came around.

Had Jesse not been selfish with his list, an everything bagel (bro I love these bagels so much) would have been delivered to him as well.

But alas, he would have to suffer.

Your arms were starting to cramp up at the odd angles you were holding everything at. The short walk from the cafe to the set proved a harder trek with the extra baggage.

Although, thankfully, the doors to the right place were insight. Today’s meeting would be held at a regular building and later in the week you would move to the actual set.

Your heart was beating a little faster than usual. Your fellow beauty gurus were nice for sure, but who could tell how these next few months would go.

Still, working with your best friend was gonna be awesome.

You walked in and flashed your ID badge to the receptionist, quickly greeting her. It was surprisingly quiet in the building considering the whole place was rented out.

However, as you neared hall doors, you could hear the muffled voices of everyone behind them.

You took a quick breath and turned the door handle.

The room was fairly large with little decoration. An elongated table sat in the middle of the room with many people around it. Some were sitting in the various chairs scattered about, but most just stood in a group of their respective departments.

First impressions were positive. Many smiling faces, a few dead stares, and a single person completely asleep on the table.

You could make out some well-known faces in the quick scan through you made.

Jesse looked away from the production manager he was talking to and caught eyes with you.

“Y/n!!” His eyes lit up.

The production manager was cut off mid-sentence. Jesse hit him on the chest playfully and excitedly in happiness.

“Dude, this is who I was telling you about,” he said as he dragged you towards them.”She’s the leech that always hangs around me and my sister.”

“Ouch-and here I thought we had something special,” you said dramatically.

The two of you paused and stared at each other before bursting into a fit of giggles. The excitement of working together seemed to hit both of you simultaneously.

The production manager just stared at you both before moving to introduce himself.

“Hi, I’m Justin. It’s nice to meet you…”

You shushed Jesse and offered your hand, “Y/n. It’s nice to meet you too-”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ll get through intros later,” Jesse interrupted. “Right now there are much more important matters to attend to.”

He guided you both to some seats and began.

“Okay, so we’re just waiting on a few people before we begin. We should start- wait what’s with all the stuff?” Jesse gestured at the coffee and bags in your arms. His mouth began to water.

You made eye contact with the group in the back of the room and smiled, “Oh these are for the other artists actually.”

“Aw, how sweet of you! Where’s mine?”

You moved your arms away just in time to miss his grabbing hands at the bags.

“Hands off, Jess! I didn’t get any for you.”

“Yo, what hell, y/n,” he whined. The sense of betrayal he went through could not be described in any other words than unforgivable. You knew this place had his favorite danish.

You had to be the devil.

“I invite you to be on my crew, MINE, and this is the thanks I get? That’s it, we’re through. I mean it.”

He huffed and turned away from you.

Justin looked at you with entertained admiration and chuckled to himself.

“Alright, alright, I’m sorry,” you picked up the coffee and pastries.”Just let me hand these out and then I’ll figure out how to make it up to you.”

“Whatever”

However, just as you began to stand from the chair, the doors to the room swung open yet again.

A man tall man with glasses walked into the room. He nodded at the various people in the room and moved along.

A shorter man with chocolate brown eyes trailed behind. He wore some comfy joggers and had a cap covering much of his hair.

All eyes shot to the second newcomer, everyone unanimously recognizing the familiar face.

Jesse recovered from his depressive state and replaced it with a shit-eating grin.

Justin rose to greet the man and give him the rundown.

You paused mid-air from your seat with wide eyes.

Tom Holland stood before all of you with a friendly smile and wave, “Hey, guys, I'm happy to finally meet you all. Sorry I’m a bit late.”

...What the actual fuck.

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A/N: My god this is so unrealistic. I literally don’t know anything about where they do all their meeting and how they film so that’s why its so vague. I am so uneducated on this 🤦‍♀️ Lol thanks for the love on the prologue though! 💌🥰

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Tag list: @greenarrowhead @diamonddia-mond @jackiehollanderr

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theonyxpath · 6 years

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Presenting “Apple,” written by the inimitable Kieron Gillen, from the upcoming Scion: Origin.

Everyone liked Donnie. They always liked him.

Donnie served the girl her cappuccino. She glanced down, and her eyes widened in delight. Written in the froth, in perfect foam writing, was the word “Brittany.”

“How did you know my name?”

Donnie shrugged a sculpted shoulder. “When you walked in the door, I just looked at you and thought… there’s a Brittany.” He unleashed his matinee-idol smile for a second. “Was I right?” Her cheeks reddened as she looked down at her drink and then, with a calm determination, raised her gaze.

“This isn’t a thing I’d normally do but…” she said, “do you want my number?”

“I’m sorry. I’ve got a girlfriend,” said Donnie, who didn’t.

This wasn’t enough to stop her. She pushed a business card across the counter. “Well, if you ever don’t have a girlfriend, call me.” She gave him a smile that made him suspect she wanted Donnie to call her, girlfriend or not, and left.

Donnie examined the card. Brittany was a model. He could have guessed. She was, by any reasonable standard, beautiful, but Donnie’s standards were far from standard. Even in L.A., where every second barista looked like a sex-symbol-in-waiting, Donnie was something else. A week didn’t go by when someone didn’t try to scout him for one agency or another. When he told them about his life story — abandoned as baby, terrible foster families, all the misery-porn human interest a marketing department could ever hope for — they offered to virtually bury him in cash to convince him to sign.

Donnie always turned them down, much to the annoyance and envy of his fellow model-actor-whatever baristas. That’s not what he came to town for, he’d explain, though he was never able to precisely articulate what he hadcome to town for. The best he managed was that shoulder shrug, his smile, and a vague “It just feels like it’s where I’m meant to be.”

Donnie knew he’d figure it out and, until then, enjoyed the game of the place, the endless stream of tiny offerings, digits he knew he’d never call pushed across his coffee-shop altar…

His musing was disturbed by Martha. She was the oldest barista, somewhere in her late 20s, maybe even edging over the 3-0.

“Hey, Donnie — it’s your turn to close up today,” she said. “Time to see if you can even make mopping look good.”

Donnie locked eyes, then lowered his head faux bashfully, looking at her through a rainforest of lashes.

“Martha, do I have to? I had other plans…” Martha froze, and then visibly melted, but just at the moment when Donnie knew she was going to let him off, she stiffened.

“No, Donnie. You have to stay late tonight,” she said, seemingly as surprised as Donnie at the words coming out of her mouth.

She turned away, before Donnie even managed to deploy a military-grade pout. This was unprecedented. He’d done this job for a year, and was yet to touch any mop other than his surfeit of luxurious hair. He didn’t know why he was doing this job, but it certainly wasn’t for dousing the ?oor with… whatever you douse the ?oor with when you’re mopping. It was only then that Donnie realized he didn’t actually know how to mop. He’d never had to. The normally iron-willed Martha could never say no to him, for obvious reasons. Few people could.

Everyone had always liked Donnie. Mostly they really liked him. In Donnie’s universe, “platonic friend” roughly translated to “friend who is biding their time.”

He sighed. He’d have to skip the gym. Not that that was a huge problem — his friends were always shocked and envious at how little he had to work out to maintain his body — but it was always a good opportunity to gather a few more digits.

Donnie had stopped going by his given name within a day and a half of arriving in L.A. A writer had glanced at his name tag, up at his face, then leaned across the counter to say, “Don’t you think that’s a little on the nose, kid?”

Donnie smiled back and, when the writer had left, googled “on the nose” and realized he agreed.

Ever since then, Adonis went by Donnie.

* * *

While he didn’t necessarily want to repeat the experience, staying after hours had its appeal. Donnie had never seen how the amber light of sunset almost miraculously transformed the workaday cafe. As much as a Santa Monica coffee place could look magical, it did. It distracted him so much, it took until the ?oor was as clean as it was going to get for Donnie to notice the cell phone.

He couldn’t see how he had missed it. He couldn’t see how anyone could miss it. It was gold-plated, wafer-thin, and beautiful. He didn’t recognize the model. He couldn’t even identify the brand until he ?ipped it over, and saw a crisp apple logo. Perhaps a prototype that someone in R&D had left? He scoured the locked phone for any sign of identification.

On the back, there was an inscription carved in its metal casing:

For The Prettiest One

The door opened. Donnie could have sworn he locked it, and was halfway through saying that they were closed before he turned around and momentarily lost control of all language.

In the doorway was the most beautiful woman Donnie had ever seen. He would have guessed she was in her late 30s, but as exquisitely preserved as Greek marble. The business suit was simple, a picture frame on her Mona Lisa. Her hair was arranged in thick braids, a crown high on her brow. For the first time since he was 16 and had met that impossibly lithe Russian gymnast, he felt the urge to offer someone his digits. Back then, the athlete had pre-empted him by passing Donnie his first, but now, Donnie could feel himself reaching for a pen and a napkin…

“I think you have my phone,” she said.

Donnie came around. A conversation. He remembered these. He could handle a conversation. He raised the phone, glinting in the light.

“I may have. Do you have any ID?”

She made the sort of expression Donnie could imagine her offering someone who interrupted a business meeting to tell an extended fart gag. She sighed, and then aimed one inevitably perfect finger at her face.

“I think you’ll find this is all the identification I need.” She smiled for the first time, a cold moon rising on a chill paradise.

Donnie found himself about to pass her the phone when they were interrupted.

“Oh god, don’t listen to her, Donnie. It’s not her phone,” said the new voice, “It’s mine.”

Small matters like how the newcomer knew his name, or the fact that the door hadn’t opened again, were forgotten as Donnie glanced in her direction. She had the sort of self-confidence that could make Donnie imagine her running a gym or a laboratory, or else ruling a library where there was little reading and much pining. She had the sort of looks that made him want to dive into a thesaurus in hope of finding better words to capture them.

She was, without a doubt, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

Donnie glanced back at the first woman. Actually, maybe not. It was hard to tell.

“My phone. I’ll take it now…unless you want things to get rough,” said the second woman, hand outstretched, “but I really don’t want that.”

Donnie was a half-foot taller than her, but felt sure that in any fight, this woman would kick his ass. If he was pressed, he’d admit that actually added to her allure. But was she more beautiful than the regal business woman? It was difficult to tell but was, as far as dilemmas to consider go, an enjoyable one. He was no closer to a decision when a third voice interrupted.

“Oh, darling. Don’t. It’s so obviously my phone…”

Donnie turned towards the new voice. That it was the third time in as many minutes this had happened didn’t diminish his sense of awe in the slightest. She was the youngest of the three, with neither the grandeur of the first or the appealing threat of the second, but instead radiated lightness and joy. Her smile was a promise: dawn when it was cold, rain when it was hot, whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted it, better than you could ever have wished.

Yes, it was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. There were a lot of them around.

“If you threaten my boy, I’ll make you wish you were never born,” she said, before laughing. “Oh, I’m sorry — of course, you were never born, Little Miss burst-from-Daddy’s-brow.”

“Don’t try to do clever. It’s not your thing. It’s my thing,” said the second woman to the newcomer, before turning to the first. “Why did you never teach this blond bastard her place?”

“Do not be too proud of yourself,” said the original. “You thought it wise to enter a contest of beauty against the queen of all heavens and the Goddess of sex. That third place is the best you can hope for is hardly the strongest argument for you being ‘Goddess of Wisdom’.”

Donnie looked between the three, and then back at the golden apple on the phone, and he started to understand. Three Gods, a difficult decision… and something bad happened afterwards? Paris? Something about going to Paris, maybe? Donnie didn’t think that sounded too bad. Paris was great. Maybe it had rained when they were there?

But the other part, the most important thing: The latest arrival had called him “my boy.”

The first was Hera. The second was Athena. The third was Aphrodite.

And Aphrodite was his mother.

He was a Scion of the Gods. He was a Scion of the Gods, and his blood was a?ame. He was a Scion of the Gods; his heart was filled with an endless choir of boys and girls like Brittany singing for him, and only him. He was a Scion of the Gods, and his name was the accelerator to the world’s pulse, He was a Scion of the Gods, He Who Breaks Hearts, He Who…

In the abstract, Donnie knew what a word like “demigod” meant. The general knowledge was revealed to be as meaningless as knowing the sun is merely a ball of hydrogen and helium. True, but oh so small, so insignificant to the purging incandescence consuming his every part.

He’d always had an interest in extreme sports, but everything paled to this. Divinity was the ultimate high.

By the time Donnie had returned to something resembling consciousness, he was shocked to find his knees still worked. The women watched, patient as only the eternal can be. As he tried to recover a passing facsimile of his easy charm, his golden blood sang a warning song to him.

This choice? This petty, shallow, vain little decision?

It was the most important of his life.

“So…girls. I get it. I have to give this phone to who’s the most beautiful,” he smiled, remembering how this story went. “Aren’t you meant to try and offer me a little motivation?”

They all looked at Donnie at once, equally harshly, then glanced away, innocent. The phone vibrated in his hand, a new message on the screen.

The only gift worth having. Power. Only I can make this world yours. – Hera

Hera met his eyes, dark as a million shadowy boardrooms.

The phone vibrated again.

Strength and the wisdom to know how to use this strength. Imagine your perfection. – Athena

Athena had folded her arms. Her expression implied that if he was considering any other offer, she’d think him a fool.

The phone vibrated once more.

Someone as beautiful as you are, my child. – Aphrodite

Aphrodite winked. Donnie was aware from how the world treated him that such temptations are always the sweetest.

Donnie turned from the women, face hidden from them as he came to his decision. He knew this would entirely define his future. Those he didn’t pick would despise him. He’d have humbled them, and the one thing he knew about these women is that they would never, ever forgive him.

Did he really want to live with this?

He smiled. Of course he did.

Donnie turned back, holding up the phone.

“I’m sorry ladies, but there’s clearly been some confusion,” he said. “You’re all extremely beautiful, of course, but this phone is for the prettiest one.”

He put his thumb on the reader. The phone unlocked.

“This is my phone.”

The temperature in the room dropped several degrees. Literally. A sheen of ice covered the windows, the surfaces of the tables, the badly mopped ?oor.

“You don’t know what enemies you’ve made today, boy,” said Hera.

“Oh, I do,” said Donnie with absolute sincerity, feeling alive for the first time, like the rest of his life had just been a prologue. “I’ve made the best enemies a man can have.

“You’ve got my digits. Don’t be strangers,” he said as he held the door open for the three Goddesses. “Now get out.”

Everyone liked Donnie.

And he was oh, so bored of that.

Scion: Origin and Scion: Hero are currently available for pre-order via BackerKit.

#Onyx Path Publishing

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sleemo · 7 years

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Edge of Darkness

From the Marines to the Emmys to the most powerful cultural force in the galaxy, for ADAM DRIVER, finding his path has been a long, hard battle. Now, for STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI, in a role he never imagined could be so complex, the brooding face of millennial angst faces his toughest fight yet. Spoiler alert!

—British GQ, December 2017

His face shrouded beneath a hood, Adam Driver strides toward me. Shoulders hunched, fists jammed into jean pockets, he lets out a low whisper, “Hi. I’m Adam.”

The mixed messages – simultaneously worrying he’ll be recognised and that he won’t – hang in the air awkwardly as Driver surveys our spot, a near-empty New York City café. Neither fear is well-founded; there is no flock of fans to notice him and yet there is no mistaking the actor, his grey hoodie notwithstanding.

“I try to disguise things, but it just doesn’t really work for me,” Driver says, shedding the sweatshirt. “I honestly just look the way I look and it’s difficult to blend in because I’m tall and I look strange. I shouldn’t put a judgment on it.”

Others have judged his appearance more favourably. Driver has been dubbed a “cure for the cookie-cutter leading man” and “a millennial sex symbol”. Which may or may not be a compliment. Although few phrases are as loaded as “unconventionally attractive”, it’s as if those two words were combined expressly to describe Driver. Exaggerated ears; hooded, slanted eyes; long nose with a boxer’s bridge; broad mouth and lips – his disparate features coalesce into a surprisingly appealing whole.

“I guess I never think about it like ‘I am a leading man’ or ‘I am a sex symbol.’ It’s strange to hear that stuff. I don’t think I could have imagined it,” says Driver. Yet, there was his visage on Gap billboard ads; in American Vogue with a black-horned ram slung across his shoulders; in a close-up at the Emmy Awards, where he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor three years in a row for his part in HBO’s Girls; and cast eternally in plastic as a Kylo Ren action figure for Star Wars: The Force Awakens – masked and unmasked versions available. (“Not bad,” he says of the likeness, “but my head and face are a lot bigger.”) Passers-by who once stopped him to ask, “How could you do that to Hannah?” in reference to the bad-boy behaviour of Driver’s character in Lena Dunham’s runaway-success television series, now ask, “How could you do that to Han Solo?”

“It’s a lot,” Driver says, “every part of my life. If we rewound to ten years ago, I would not have said that this is what my life would be.

“And now this music,” he waves his hands at the piano composition streaming through the café like pretentious Musack, “is making that sound so emotional. It isn’t helping, you know?”

Far from angry, the brooding face of millennial angst is smirking. At 33, Adam Driver’s signature intensity hasn’t wavered, but interest in being a tortured artist has. He’s aware of his tendencies – toward anxiety, analysis and absolutism – and is taking steps to temper them. Still, it’s a struggle, seeing good fortune as anything but a cause for self-flagellation.

If we did rewind ten years, we’d see why. Driver was a Gordian knot of clenched intensity. Enrolled at New York’s Juilliard performing arts school, he was so aggressive that his comments made fellow students cry. Every morning he would have six eggs for breakfast, then run five miles to the school from his home in Queens. He would eat a whole chicken for lunch and, during his day at the prestigious drama school, perform random feats, such as 1,000 push-ups.

“That must’ve been an obnoxious thing to be around,” he says, shaking his head. “I was trying to make it as extreme for myself as possible. Now it just makes me so tired and annoyed.”

I’ve met Driver in a peaceful, leafy corner of the Brooklyn Heights neighbourhood that he and his wife, Joanne Tucker, call home. It’s a square precinct full of baby strollers that belies the borough’s hipster cred. “I like sleepy, quiet places,” Driver explains, “because my job is very loud.” Right now he’s savouring a respite from work, the first in a five-year sprint to stardom and even letting himself idle a little. Driver, who has made a career of ill-at-ease eccentricity, is starting to feel comfortable in his own skin.

He genuinely enjoyed himself on the set of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which will be released in cinemas this December. “The first one was all ‘You can’t fuck it up,’ you know? There was a lot more hanging out this time,” Driver says. “Then there are just practical things, like I have a lightsaber. That’s fun.”

Whatever the outcome of the larger battle between good and evil, the Resistance and the First Order, never underestimate the power of Driver’s light side. ”I had heard about Adam’s intensity before I worked with him, but he’s also really fun and funny,” says Rian Johnson, The Last Jedi’s director.

There was one emotionally charged scene that they shot over and over. “Every time the guy holding the clapper marked each take, Adam just starts trying to steal his shoe,” Johnson recalls. “It was hilarious. And then Adam goes straight into it with all the intensity of Kylo Ren. He just added a sense of play that made the process really click.”

Neither Johnson nor Driver can say what the scene was about or who else was in it. They are acutely aware of the cone of silence that surrounds the Star Wars films, suitably enough, like a force field. “There’s probably something in my contract, I don’t know – but it’s kind of unbelievable that no one has told me, ‘Don’t say anything,’” Driver explains. “It’s just implicitly understood.”

With plot points guarded like state secrets, even the tiniest perceived leak sets off an online feeding frenzy. Internet scribes grab at every quote, often misreading them. “You have to clarify truthful things you’ve said that people read these false things into,” Driver says. “It can be frustrating.”

After several years of sidestepping spoilers, Driver is practised at the art of obfuscation. His evasive manoeuvres are near perfect.

On whether he enjoyed acting opposite Daisy Ridley, who plays Rey: “That’s hard to answer. I mean, people assume that we’d spend time with each other. Maybe our characters see each other in the movie?”

On whether he had scenes with Carrie Fisher: “It’s hard to answer without being vague.”

On whether the lightsaber scar on his face, which came courtesy of Rey in The Force Awakens, was moved for the new film: “I noticed a lot of things.”

On whether Kylo Ren’s story has a happy ending: “Not saying yes or no. But continue.”

On whether Han Solo might have known Kylo Ren would kill him: “That’s interesting.”

On whether he appears with his mask off: “Yes, I can answer that. You’ll see it off in the new trailer, so I’m not giving anything away!”

Other times, Driver playfully embraces the absurdity of it all. “I can’t say anything, but what if I signal you,” he jokes. “If I just start sneezing uncontrollably…” He fakes a loud achoo and exclaims, “Bingo! Harrison Ford’s ghost returns!”

When I ask him about Kylo Ren’s mysterious order of Dark Side disciples, the Knights of Ren, he waxes whimsical. “We can talk about them. Peter, Paul, John… No, I was thinking of The Beatles. Except wait – there’s Peter. He was too ambitious on the tambourine. Now you know: the last Knight of Ren is Ringo Starr!”

On this particular mid-September day, the internet is abuzz with new speculation that Ridley’s character, Rey, is the daughter of Princess Leia (also Kylo Ren’s mother). This theory would take any romantic tension between her and Driver’s Kylo Ren into the realm of incest – territory that the first Star Wars trilogy explored with a kiss between Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker and Carrie Fisher’s Leia.

“Yeah, my uncle and my mum made out,” Driver says, with a laugh. “Which Mark still talks about. He’s like, ‘Luke kissed his sister. How could he do that?’ I guess he hasn’t seen Game Of Thrones, you know?”

The Last Jedi marks the final film in Fisher’s storied career. Like the rest of the cast, Driver was shaken by the actress’ death last December at age 60. “It’s hard to talk about it without saying generic things,” he says. “Like, ‘It’s shocking,’ but it was. Or ‘It’s incredibly sad,’ which it is. I mean, it is all of those things.”

Driver brightens as he recalls Fisher’s wit on display at Comic-Con before the release of The Force Awakens. “The whole cast was downstairs in a conference room, talking through what’s supposed to happen at this big event. She was like, ‘Just pretend you’re down to earth. People love that shit.’” Driver pauses for a moment then laughs. “So now I pretend I’m down to earth and you know what? People really do love that shit. They eat it up.”

The image of Driver that people have consumed is not so much down to earth as intense and uncompromising, the all-or-nothing avatar of millennial manhood named Adam Sackler, Driver’s character in Girls. Ever since Driver landed the part, originally a cameo called simply “Handsome Carpenter”, the notion he really was that id-driven artist has, like the life of another charismatic carpenter, been taken as gospel.

In the public consciousness, Driver’s backstory is as extreme as his alter ego’s: a Midwestern misfit enlists in the Marines after 9/11, then studies acting at Juilliard – and finds he’s an outlier in both worlds. The truth is both less and more dramatic.

Born in San Diego, California, Driver is the son of a preacher. When his parents divorced, Driver moved with his mother back to her native Mishawaka, Indiana, where she was soon remarried to a Baptist minister. As a teenager, Driver was a poor student who dabbled in pyromania, trainspotting and climbing radio towers. A fan of the film Fight Club, Driver started one with some friends. “Just seeing the angst, I thought it would be a good idea to emulate it.“

Acting offered Driver a way out of the tiny town he called a shithole. “I applied to Juilliard when I was graduating high school and didn’t get in, so I was like ‘Well, fuck it. I won’t go to college, then.’” Instead, he set off for Hollywood and what he thought would be overnight stardom. “I’d always heard the stories of people striking out and finding success,” he says. “Why not me?” The dream lasted as long as his hand-me-down 1990 Lincoln Town Car did. After it broke down outside Amarillo, Texas, the repairs cost Driver nearly all the money he’d saved. When he finally limped into Los Angeles, Driver spent two nights in youth hostels. The only agent he signed with was a real estate agency, which took him for the rest of his savings. Having landed neither an apartment nor an acting gig, Driver arrived back in Indiana a week after leaving.

Following the 11 September attacks, Driver did not, as some retellings suggest, march down to the recruiting station. Instead, he enlisted in the Marines several months later. “My stepfather pushed me into it a little bit, which was good – I was grateful for it,” Driver says. “It followed an argument where he was like, ‘You’re not doing anything!’ I’d gotten this brochure in the mail. He was like, ‘Why don’t you just join?’ I was like, ‘No, I’m not going to join the Marines.’ Then I thought about it more. I had this sense of patriotism and wanted to get involved. I also had no prospects. I was living in the back of my parents’ house, working as a telemarketer.”

From the start, Driver’s time in uniform had a profound effect on him and his worldview. “The patriotism, the idea of country, doesn’t go away necessarily, it just turns into something else,” he says, reverently. “Not a big, sweeping idea, but this group of people you’re serving with, and that becomes your world, and it becomes sacred.”

Going into the Marines, Driver had a seemingly straightforward goal: “I’m going to be a man.” But rather than reinforce clichéd concepts of masculinity, military service put the lie to them. “You have to put implicit trust in the people to your left and right, and when they demonstrate that they’re looking out for you, that their own safety is secondary to yours, then all that kind of guy shit goes away and there is no ego,” Driver says. “There is no posturing, no need to say how much of a man you are, whatever that even means. You prove it with your actions.”

When Driver was not allowed to deploy to the Middle East with his unit, after suffering a broken sternum in a mountain biking accident, he was despondent. Although he fought to stay on active duty, Driver ultimately received a medical discharge.

He decided to apply to Juilliard again and this time got in. The transition from the Marine Corps to a New York City drama programme was jarring. During Driver’s second year, in an effort to bridge his past and present vocations, he launched a non-profit called Arts In The Armed Forces with his then-girlfriend, now wife, Tucker. Driver was able to carry a discipline and teamwork into his studies, but it didn’t stop him from feeling he’d gone soft. “I was like, ‘What am I doing? I’m wearing pyjamas doing acting exercises where I’m giving birth to myself or being a plant or moving around in jelly,’” he says. “Then again, even now, I’m like, ‘What am I doing?’”

After a brief fallow period after graduating from Juilliard, Driver says he learned to hate everyone in the audition room. He didn’t like TV and almost skipped his audition for Girls entirely. Instead, he dazzled the show’s creator, Lena Dunham, and the one-episode part Driver had read for was expanded into a central one. In audition after audition, Driver made a similar impression on a series of noted directors. Even before Girls aired, Steven Spielberg cast him in Lincoln, in which he played a telegraph operator opposite Daniel Day-Lewis. “He was very nice to me,” Driver says of the legendary method actor. “He would still talk in character, but very nice.”

In particular, Driver’s unusual, instinctive style made him a favourite of indie filmmakers. He landed meaty roles in the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis and a series of films by writer-director Noah Baumbach: Frances Ha, While We’re Young and The Meyerowitz Stories (New And Selected). He played the lead in Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson and shared top billing in Steven Soderbergh’s heist comedy Logan Lucky. When Martin Scorsese was finally able to make his passion project, Silence, after two decades, he sought out Driver. Similarly, Driver recently wrapped shooting on The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which Terry Gilliam had been trying to make for 17 years.

And yet nothing Driver had done remotely prepared him for Star Wars. He had grown up a fan of the original trilogy, but had little faith in outsized film franchises. “I’m leery of big movies – a lot of them sacrifice character for spectacle,” he says. “When they’re bad, it pisses me off – you can just tell it’s made by a bunch of executives somewhere.”

Despite his initial trepidation, the complicated nature of Kylo Ren put Driver’s concerns to rest. “It was all about story and character and playing someone who doesn’t have it all together. Making him as human as possible seemed dangerous and exciting to me.”

Driver was drawn to an idea that JJ Abrams, who wrote and directed The Force Awakens, had. The man behind the mask was not a man at all, but rather a young person struggling to come of age. “I remember the initial conversations about having things ‘skinned’,” Driver recalls, “peeling away layers to evolve into other people, and the person Kylo’s pretending to be on the outside is not who he is. He’s a vulnerable kid who doesn’t know where to put his energy, but when he puts his mask on, suddenly, he’s playing a role. JJ had that idea initially and I think Rian took it to the next level.”

Driver is on a roll now, discussing what excites him: character and narrative and cinematic influences. The original Star Wars was an homage to Akira Kurosawa’s 1958 film The Hidden Fortress, he says, and the link lives on in the new trilogy, in which concealed identities drive the narrative. Then he lets it slip. “You have, also, the hidden identity of this princess who’s hiding who she really is so she can survive and Kylo Ren and her hiding behind these artifices,” Driver says, apparently dropping a massive revelation about Rey’s royal origins.

Perhaps he’s unconcerned and Rey’s parentage is less dramatic than imagined by fans, who posited that her father is Luke then trumpeted that her mother is Leia. Or it could be that, in passionately holding forth, Driver is simply unaware he’s revealed anything, much less a major spoiler. In any case, he doesn’t skip a beat. “The things that made it personal to me,” Driver continues, “I’ll keep to myself, but I think everybody can relate to the idea of almost being betrayed.

“Wow, this music is killing me.”

As the café’s latest piano piece reaches its crescendo, I ask Driver if he tapped into his own experiences with his dad and stepfather and he reverts to evasive manoeuvres.

“I may leave that one. I have strong convictions about not talking about family, for many reasons,” Driver says. “It’s not as if the answers for Kylo are found in my relationships with my parents.”

In The Last Jedi, director Rian Johnson saw Driver go light years beyond his own experience. “Adam was always pushing the context of the character,” Johnson says. “He’s put in this unhealthy environment and goes through the worst of youth, the selfishness and volatility, he’s representing that side of adolescence.”

Of course, these days immaturity and insecurity are no strangers to power. “It makes complete sense how juvenile he can be,” Driver says of Ren, who prefers lightsabers over Twitter for his tantrums. “You can see that with our leadership and politics. You have world leaders who you imagine – or hope or pray – are living by kind of a higher code of ethics. But it really all comes down to them feeling wronged or unloved or wanting validation.”

Even more topical and even more touchy was the decision to play Kylo Ren like a radicalised extremist. “We talked about terrorism a lot,” Driver says of his early conversations with Abrams and Johnson about his character. “You have young and deeply committed people with one-sided education who think in absolutes. That is more dangerous than being evil. Kylo thinks what he is doing is entirely right, and that, in my mind, is the scariest part.”

The demagoguery drives him to the most famous film patricide in galactic history, as Kylo Ren kills Han Solo in the shocking denouement of The Force Awakens. “When I watched the premiere, I felt sick to my stomach,” Driver recalls. “The people behind me, when the scroll started, were like ‘Oh my god. Oh my god. It’s happening.’ Immediately, I thought I was going to puke. I was holding my wife’s hand, and she’s like, ‘You’re really cold. Are you OK?’ Because I just knew what was coming – I kill Harrison – and I didn’t know how this audience of 2,000 people was going to respond to it, you know?”

One person in the crowd who appreciated that scene was Han Solo himself. “We were sitting on this catwalk in between takes,” Driver recalls, “and Harrison was like, ‘Look what we get to do. Just look what we get to do.’ Meaning, look at how lucky we are that this is our job, you know? To see someone at that point in his career still get excited like that hit me. It’s like, ‘Oh, right. I need to take this in more.’”

As if on cue, a couple stop and introduce themselves. “I love everything you’ve ever done,” the wife says. “Everything.”

“Thanks a million. Yeah. Hi, I’m Adam.”

As fan encounters go, it is respectful and pleasant, but not even a whimper of what will soon follow come the release of The Last Jedi.

For all the ways in which he’s made peace with his success, Driver, who is almost pathologically private by nature, remains uncomfortable with notoriety. “I’m not in the world the same way I was before,” Driver says. “It’s completely changed my life. My anonymity is gone. But who I am as a person is the exact same. I think. Or, I hope.”

Soon after, we exit the café, as Driver is heading home for some quiet time. He stops in front of a bicycle locked to a fence. “It only looks bourgeois-hipster because of the saddle,” Driver says, adding that he’s only just added the leather Brooks seat. “I bought the bike for $200 back when I was at Juilliard,” Driver says. “Besides the seat, it’s the same crappy bike I’ve had for forever.”

Driver pulls his hoodie up over his head and as he starts pedalling off turns back to me. “Remember,” he says. “Pretend you’re down to earth. People love that shit. Right?”

The Last Jedi is out on 15 December.

#this is the ENTIRE THING #gah its so long #this took forever #adam driver #interview #gq #kylo ren #ben solo #star wars #the last jedi #the force awakens #long post

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Expert: Our capitalist elites have used propaganda, money and the marginalizing of their critics to erase the first three of philosopher John Locke’s elements of the perfect state: liberty, equality and freedom. They exclusively empower the fourth, property. Liberty and freedom in the corporate state mean the liberty and freedom of corporations and the rich to exploit and pillage without government interference or regulatory oversight. And the single most important characteristic of government is its willingness to use force, at home and abroad, to protect the interests of the property classes. — Chris Hedges, “Corpses of Souls” Here’s a thought experiment for social workers assisting homeless, recovery (drug, alcohol), re-entry (coming out of prison), and those diagnosed with mental and physical health challenges: Take a college educated “professional,” George, and then a “homeless” person, Julia, and put them in the same tattered clothes, take away phone, ID, money, credit cards, blindfold them, transport them from say Portland, Oregon, and to Toronto, Canada, or Buffalo, NY, and drop them off in an alley in a run-down part of town at 3 am on a Monday. Then challenge them to get back to square “go.” We know the homeless person, or the former incarcerated person, or the recovering addict will be home — Portland – within 48 hours. The professional, either in FIRE (finance insurance real estate) or any number of elite fields, will tank quickly. Especially if we were to drop that person off outside of town into a homeless camp. In my field of social work, many employers I talk to would rather have a former inmate, a former felon, who has gotten his or her life back on track, on the job. Really. There are even Harvard (who cares that it’s Ivy League, by the way?) studies to that effect. Of course, the rationale is based on company loyalty; an ex-con would really appreciate his freedoms now; hard work – workaholic – since all that time in the lobotomizing prison system would kick in an obsessiveness toward keeping busy, keeping moving. Then, some employers I talk to think most workers or potential workers are the problem, would steal time, money, goods, and things from the company. So, the felon has already done time, knows the depravity of prison systems, and would stay on the up and up without jeopardizing incarceration. Plus, in the US, companies get a tax break for hiring former felons! The fields of social work are growing, yet the pay is shrinking, the work conditions are ramped up, the management are bizarre examples of former social workers themselves (very anti worker, very hard on outside-the-box thinkers, and completely blank on what radical social work is and how to even apply the principles of that form of social work). Most non-profits do the dirty work of what a society is looking more and more to not provide for – mental health care for a bigger and bigger share of the USA population; disability services for a larger and larger swath of Americans mentally, psychologically, intellectually, socially, physically, and spiritually broken or disabled; financial, employment, education, housing assistance for an ever-growing population of humans who are not able to work and live and transport and find health care for themselves in this New Gilded Age. The non-profits I have worked for are top-heavy, have very little money put aside or earmarked or grant-provided for the workers; many of the non-profits hire development associates, upper management shills, PR folk, marketing and events coordinators; many are in shining and remodeled digs while casting shadows on the street people they supposedly care about. Some of us in social services have come from other professions, and like me, many are former teachers. Very few are radical thinkers, and many are just trying to hang on. When you work in an at-will state, where organizing and workplace coordinating is akin to communism, and when you work for people younger and the same age as yourself who once had their lives more or less put together but who are today on the streets, in shelters, in vans on the side of the road, and who have to pay for legal debts – hospital bills, legal financial obligations, debts coming at them via mean-assed debt collectors and repo men — the idea of Six Degrees of Separation comes cold like melting glaciers as really Only One Degree of Separation. Manfred Max Neef calls this country, USA — richest, biggest land rip off abusing, military mightiest, vastest financial thieving, culturally insanest — underdeveloping. I mean, your country is the most dramatic example that you can find. I have gone as far as saying — and this is a chapter of a book of mine that is published next month in England, the title of which is Economics Unmasked. There is a chapter called “The United States, an Underdeveloping Nation,” which is a new category. We have developed, underdeveloped and developing. Now you have underdeveloping. And your country is an example, in which the one percent of the Americans, you know, are doing better and better and better, and the 99 percent is going down, in all sorts of manifestations. People living in their cars now and sleeping in their cars, you know, parked in front of the house that used to be their house — thousands of people. Millions of people, you know, have lost everything. But the speculators that brought about the whole mess, oh, they are fantastically well off. No problem. No problem. This short piece – rare for me at DV, LA Progressive, and other places, since I still believe that concision is not a favorable tool to understanding the complexities of our society and systems thinking – is all tied to really what many Americans WAY WAY before Trump’s family set foot in this country have always believed about Mexico or New Orleans or Dominican Republic or South Africa or Philippines or Afghanistan (just replace a country like Haiti with any number of 120 countries in the world) have said, stated, written and professed undiplomatically and through the Economic Hit Men: They are ALL shitholes. I have had plenty of people in my 61 years living on this planet, after being in dozens of countries (I have lived and worked in), fellow (sic) Americans (sic) who thought my white skin and my little lists of three college degrees and my male status entitled my fellow Americans to rant on and on about how dirty, backward, primitive, slow-witted, poor, inefficient, shady, criminal this or that country is — countries from which I lived, traveled and worked and those many have not stepped foot in, beyond FOX News and Hollywood propaganda. That Trump now voices what Americans have believed, and economists have practiced, and our military branches have reflected – America is Great, and the rest of the rabble (well, maybe not Norway or Finland — that’s about it for that pure white race places) are part and particle the shitholes Trump so undiplomatically states the world is. In reality, though, if we look at the definition of “shit”/”hole,” it all comes back to this warring, militant, earth-killing, global lording over country called the United States of America. Infantilized, lobotomized, one-paycheck/broken bone/auto accident/employment termination/criminal justice involved/foreclosure AWAY from shithole status. This poor white and now multi-race co-opting country of people who have zero idea how and why its more or less isolated little status among the global actors is set in their minds as “okay . . . Great/Yes We Can/Make It Great Again/Numero Uno” because of the shit we serve up to the rest of the world vis-à-vis military and economic and resource plundering insanity. While our own country is full of shit-holes– full of systems of penury and debasement and depravity and delusion and destruction and increasing wrath upon its own populations – we see this spasm of protestations from the Liberal Democrats Who Support All Those Democratic Party apparatchiks of regime change and collateral damage carried out on what Bush or Obama see as the “shit hole Iraqis and Afghans and Libyans and Yeminis and Somalis.” Imagine, the democrats crying about Trump and his redneck Americanism. Which party said we had to bomb them back to the stone age? Which party wrapped up Japanese Americans in barbed wire luxury? Which party helped to wipe out 3 million Vietnamese? Who bombed, razed, illegally mined, economically double-triple tapped the world’s other shit holes? Way-way before two-bit The Apprentice got raves and ratings and millions. It’s Trump who is still on record ranting about the Central Park Five, found to be falsely convicted and held in prison (now released), stating months ago, after the five men were acquitted, found to be innocent and released, that “they are guilty of the rape, man.” His Trump Faulty Towers Corp. paid or two full page ads in the NYT ranting about “their guilty” after they were found innocent. Again, a reset button is necessary when looking at the big billionaire’s motley mind and fourth grade thinking style: who is he, how did he get here, where did he learn, how did he exist in this country, what is his American soul made of . . . . The who, why, when, what, where and how are questions Americans of all political stripes never ask. We can tap dance around those “deplorables” voting for George Wallace or Barry Goldwater or George Bush or Donald Trump, or dance around those millionaires who see other shitholes producing other super predators, or two-step into more delusion when Super Rich Hollywood defines You and Me and Success and Failure, or when Amazon dot com comes crashing into your local bricks and mortar, or how the millionaire media or celebrities come into your living rooms via cable or iPhone and kidnap your loved ones, young and old. Seriously, which shithole shall we concentrate on in the US of A, the engine of shit holes, the Mother of All Shitholes, coming to a neighborhood nearby, or Flint Michigan, or Charlottesville, or Fortune 1000 boardroom or dis-education college faculty and administration? Who in your group of friends and acquaintances even knows what economics is for? Manfred Max Neef again: One, the economy is to serve the people and not the people to serve the economy. Two, development is about people and not about objects. Three, growth is not the same as development, and development does not necessarily require growth. Four, no economy is possible in the absence of ecosystem services. Five, the economy is a subsystem of a larger finite system, the biosphere, hence permanent growth is impossible. And the fundamental value to sustain a new economy should be that no economic interest, under no circumstance, can be above the reverence of life. I am sorry to say in my years as a journalist, college teacher, union organizer, social worker, environmentalist, urban planner, etc., I have run into more shithole thinkers in this country than all the countries I’ve been to combined, by far. If you want to run into real thugs, real criminals, real depravity, delusional thinking, disgusting thinking, real retrograde philosophy, real illiteracy, real infantilism, come to a town near me – Pacific Northwest, or Texas or Arizona, or anywhere I have done my time in. Not many anti-Trump people would question the root cause of his shithole role running this shithole country, and the mirror is not large enough for self-reflection: biggest military in the world, biggest land mass stolen from original nations, biggest area cleared of natural ecosystems, biggest group of la-la-land thinkers. Magical thinkers, the lot of us, really. Let the knee-jerking go on and on as Americans attempt to parse out who they are in that mirror mirror on the wall! Unless you have ended the mythical belief in this country’s prowess and greatness and stopped hiding from this society’s advanced malignant cancer called predatory and consumer capitalism, then you are the Trump in that mirror, without or without the orange glow! Max-Neef: First of all, we need cultured economists again, who know the history, where they come from, how the ideas originated, who did what, and so on and so on; second, an economics now that understands itself very clearly as a subsystem of a larger system that is finite, the biosphere, hence economic growth as an impossibility; and third, a system that understands that it cannot function without the seriousness of ecosystems. And economists know nothing about ecosystems. They don’t know nothing about thermodynamics, you know, nothing about biodiversity or anything. I mean, they are totally ignorant in that respect. And I don’t see what harm it would do, you know, to an economist to know that if the beasts would disappear, he would disappear as well, because there wouldn’t be food anymore. But he doesn’t know that, you know, that we depend absolutely from nature. But for these economists we have, nature is a subsystem of the economy. I mean, it’s absolutely crazy. http://clubof.info/

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