….
After announcing the theme park and handling the aftermath, Regal moved to lock in his next slate, each project carrying its own complications and pressure points.
For [Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix], the immediate priorities were clear, securing a director capable of handling the tonal shift and scale, and filling the role of Dumbledore with someone who could carry authority without losing warmth.
At the same time, it was finally time to move on a [Batman] project, which meant finding someone disciplined enough to ground the character and ambitious enough to redefine him without losing the core.
That decision could not be rushed.
Alongside all of that, Regal had committed to his own directorial project, [John Wick].
Right.
Finally.
At last.
He had decided to do it.
Personally, he is really excited about the project - it would demand precision, restraint, and a completely different kind of storytelling.
But before any of that could move forward, there was something he needed to finish.
[The Incredible Hulk] was two weeks from release. The trailer was already out, momentum building, expectations rising.
Karl Urban and John Tunnard were already deep into promotion.
Today, Regal would join them.
….
The greenroom at The Limelight Studios was running four minutes behind schedule and trying very hard not to show it.
Karl Urban was sitting in one of the makeup chairs reading something on his phone with relaxed authority, completely contrary to that of an actor making his debut into Hollywood as a main lead.
And not to mention the scale of the project.
John Tunnard, the director, was standing near the craft table assembling a plate of food with the focused attention of someone who had skipped breakfast and was not going to let that continue.
Samantha was in the corner running through the segment rundown with the show's producer, a woman named - Bex.
Regal arrived eleven minutes before the segment was due to begin, which was eleven minutes later than Samantha would have liked and four minutes earlier than she had actually expected.
He came in through the side door and stopped.
Karl was holding - had been holding since he walked in from the parking bay, in fact, with the complete casualness of someone carrying a cup of coffee, an eight-foot foam sculpture.
It was green, vaguely humanoid, and blue foam pants.
The approximate shape and heft of a very large, very patient man rendered in thermocol, which was the Indian term for the material that Karl had apparently sourced because he found it funnier than fibreglass and which had the advantage of being light enough to carry one-handed.
Regal came through the side door, stopped, and looked at it.
Karl looked up from his phone. "Before you say anything…. this was your idea."
"My idea was a framing device." Regal said.
"This is a framing device, a physical one and very accessible." Karl set his phone down and gave the sculpture a small adjustment so it faced the room more squarely. "I have named him Gerald."
John looked over from the craft table. "You named it this morning."
"He's had the name since this morning. That's long enough for it to count."
Samantha appeared at Regal's shoulder. "The show's producer wants to know if the prop is going to be part of the segment."
"Yes." Regal said.
She relayed this, a pause from the other end, then she lowered the phone slightly. "She says Tom is going to lose his mind."
Karl stood up, tucked Gerald under his arm, and headed toward the studio door. "Obviously." he said, and walked through it.
….
Tom Holland was twenty years old.
He, alongside Zendaya, had been the talk of the town in Hollywood for the last three months.
And even after that, he cannot seem to hide the overwhelmingness he was feeling.
He had never interviewed people before - this will be his first time in the host's chair for a promotional segment.
The person he needs to interview is Regal Seraphsail-
-who was the person who had directed him in [I Want to Eat Your Pancreas], and also the man whose professional authority he respected enormously.
And he had definitely not previously interviewed that same person alongside Karl Urban and a foam sculpture.
He was talking when they walked out.
He had been talking since the floor manager gave him his cue and he showed no signs of stopping, which the studio audience was finding charming, which Tom registered and which had the effect of encouraging more talking.
"-and I am told they're bringing something in, which nobody will tell me what it is, and in my experience when nobody will tell you what it is… It's either something amazing or something that's going to make you wish you had stayed home, and I am… oh–!"
Karl came through the studio entrance carrying the foam Hulk.
The audience reacted, not with shock exactly - with the delighted noise of people whose expectations have been exceeded in a direction they didn't anticipate.
Tom stared at it.
Karl set it carefully in the fourth chair, the one that had been placed at the end of the panel arrangement, and gave it a small adjusting nudge so it faced the audience squarely.
"He insisted on a seat." Karl said, completely straight-faced, and sat down in his own chair.
Tom looked at the foam Hulk, then at Karl and Regal, who had sat down last and whose expression was the expression of a man at a meeting rather than a talk show, which somehow made the foam Hulk funnier by contrast.
"Is he…" Tom started. "Does he have his own… Is he going to answer questions?"
"He might." Karl said. "He's very opinionated."
Tom pressed his hand briefly over his mouth, recovered. "Okay. Okay. Welcome, everyone, welcome… all four of you…" the audience laughed. "Welcome to the show."
He looked at his card, put it down. "I am going to be honest, I had questions prepared and I feel like the questions are now less interesting than whatever this is, so I am just… We're going to see what happens."
Regal nodded approvingly.
Tom caught it and felt, obscurely, that he had passed some kind of test.
….
Tom started with the obvious question, because the obvious question was the right one.
"So… Hulk." he said, gesturing between the foam figure and the general concept. "The film comes out in two weeks. I have seen the trailer, obviously, everyone's seen the trailer, and there's… It feels different from what I expected, especially Hulk."
He leaned forward slightly. "Whose idea was it to play him that way?"
Karl opened his mouth, and then stopped.
He turned and looked at Regal with an expression that was completely transparent.
"This idea is Regal's." Karl said. "And I have nothing more to add to that."
John laughed unguardedly like someone who had heard this deflection before and found it no less accurate for the repetition. He nodded beside Karl with the energy of a man enthusiastically declining responsibility.
Tom looked at Regal.
Regal looked back at Tom with the equanimity of a man who had expected this.
"The idea." Regal said. "Is that Hulk and Bruce Banner not the same person wearing different clothes? They are two different people sharing a body. Bruce doesn't become Hulk when he's angry. Bruce steps back… Or gets pushed back… and Hulk steps forward. Hulk has his own perspective, preferences and sense of what's happening around him. He's not a symptom. He's a person."
Tom was nodding slowly. "So the anger isn't... Hulk isn't just Bruce's anger."
"Hulk experiences anger and so does Bruce. They experience it differently, because they're different people. What the film is interested in is what happens when two people who have fundamentally different approaches to the world are forced to share the same physical existence."
Regal paused. "And one of them is enormous and green, which adds a logistical dimension."
The audience laughed and Tom grinned.
"Karl." Tom said, turning. "You're playing Bruce. How do you play a character who is and isn't the character at the same time?"
Karl considered this with the seriousness it deserved. "The way I thought about it was… Bruce knows Hulk exists. He can feel where Hulk begins, and Hulk knows Bruce exists. There's a border between them and they're both aware of the border, and they have different feelings about it."
He glanced at the foam figure. "And Hulk is better looking."
The foam figure stared at the audience.
….
Tom turned a page of his notes, decided not to use them, and turned it back.
"Can I ask about the shoot? Because I watched the trailer and there is a lot happening in it, action wise, and…." he paused, and a slightly different quality came into his voice, the tone of someone about to admit something specific
Tom said. "During the shoot of [I want to eat your pancrias] I got hit to the ground and broke my leg. I spent the following weeks in the hospital."
The audience made the noise of sympathetic amusement.
"So I cannot imagine." Tom continued. "What a full production of this scale, with the kind of sequences that are in this trailer… nobody got hurt? Nobody? Through the whole shoot?"
John shook his head. "Not one injury on set. I will say that clearly."
Tom stared at him. "None?"
Tom turned to Karl, who confirmed this with a nod. Tom turned to Regal, who also confirmed it, and whose expression said: this is not remarkable, this is what a well-run set looks like.
….
The script question came up naturally, in the way that questions come up when a conversation is going well and people are following the thread rather than the plan.
Tom had been building toward it without quite knowing he was building toward it - he had asked about preparation, about how much of the film each of them knew going into a particular sequence, about whether John kept things from his cast for creative reasons - and then he arrived at it directly.
He looked at Karl. "Did you get the full script from the beginning?"
"Day one." Karl said. "Everything. I find it essential to understand the full arc before I make choices in individual scenes. You can't properly serve a moment without knowing what it's in service of."
Tom nodded agreeably, turned to John, who confirmed the same approach, adding something about the relationship between actor confidence and narrative transparency, and Tom nodded through this too, and then he turned to Regal with an expression that was completely pleasant and not quite what it appeared to be.
"Right." Tom said. "Right, yes, completely agree, very sensible, very professional." His voice was doing the thing it did when he was delivering something that appeared agreeable and wasn't quite. "I was just thinking… I didn't get the full script."
"...." He looked at Regal.
"...." Regal looked back.
"I got sections." Tom said pleasantly. "I got the scenes I was in, adjacent to them, sometimes, for context. What I did not get was the whole picture."
He tilted his head. "Which I understand is a directorial choice and I fully respect it as a directorial choice."
"Thank you." Regal said.
"I just find it interesting." Tom continued, in the same pleasant tone. "That Karl, who is in an action film with. How many major set pieces…"
"Seven." John said.
"Seven major set pieces, got the full script from day one. Whereas I, who was in a film where the most physical demand placed on me was sitting at a school desk looking emotionally available… did not."
He smiled at the audience. "Interesting."
The audience loved this.
Karl was grinning and John had put his hand over his mouth.
Regal said, with no change in expression: "Seeing the full script would have changed how you played the scenes you were in."
Tom looked at him. "In a bad direction?"
"In a less precise one. The uncertainty in your performance was specific and it needed to be genuinely felt, not navigated."
Tom held this for a moment. "That's a remarkably well-constructed answer."
"I have had it ready since you sent the question list."
Tom stared at him. "You read the question list. You sat there for twenty minutes waiting for me to get to it, with the answer already prepared."
"You took longer to arrive at it than I expected."
"Because I was trying to be subtle about it!"
"You were." Regal said. "The approach was good. The question landed exactly where you intended."
Tom turned to the audience with the expression of a man who has just been simultaneously complimented and completely dismantled and isn't sure which to respond to first.
He looked at the foam Hulk.
"I feel like you would be more useful right now." he told it.
The figure offered nothing, which Karl interpreted as solidarity and which read, somehow, as the funniest thing the figure had done in all segments.
….
There was a moment in the final third of the segment that was quieter than the rest.
Tom had been asking about the film's release - two weeks, the promotional run, what that period felt like for the people involved.
And John had been answering in the thorough, considered way he approached most questions, and Karl had added something about the particular atmosphere of a film nearing its public life, the strange transition from something private to something shared.
And Tom had said, almost without planning to: "I remember that. With Pancreas."
He caught himself. "That's what we call it on set." he added, to the audience. "The full title is…. it's a long title."
The audience nodded.
"That transition." Tom continued. "When it stops being yours and comes out and it belongs to everyone." He paused. "I wasn't prepared for that, I assumed I was, but clearly I wasn't."
The room had changed in quality slightly. The laugh track instinct in the studio audience had suspended itself, which was the sign of a segment doing something worth listening to.
Regal was watching Tom with a specific quality of attention, not the interview attention, not the colleague attention, but something that was closer to the attention he paid to performances that were telling the truth without intending to.
"What were you not prepared for?" Regal asked.
Tom glanced at him and something in the glance said: I didn't expect you to ask that.
"The…" he stopped and started again. "People would come up to me. After screenings. Or I would see things online, and they weren't talking about the film exactly. They were talking about - something the film had unlocked in them. Their own version of it."
He looked at the audience, then back. "And I hadn't acted their version of it. I had acted my version of it. But somehow it became theirs anyway."
A pause.
"Which is either the whole point of making something." he said. "Or the most disorienting thing that can happen to a person."
Karl, who was a man not given to unnecessary sentiment but who recognised a real thing when he heard one, nodded once. John did the same.
Regal said nothing.
Which was the way he responded to things he thought were exactly right.
Tom clocked this, and in the way of someone who had worked with Regal long enough to read the silences, understood what it meant.
He picked up another card.
"Last question." he said, recovering the register of the segment. "And I am asking this to all four of you equally…" he looked at the foam figure. "Including him."
The audience laughed as the room came back to itself.
"Two weeks." Tom said. "Are you ready?"
All of them looked at each other with expression, being fixed and thermocol, communicating a kind of permanent readiness.
"He is." Karl said, nodding at the figure.
"He's always ready." John agreed.
Tom turned to Regal.
Regal looked at him for a moment.
"We made something good." he said, without the performance of confidence, just the fact of it. "People will know when they see it."
Tom held his gaze for a beat.
"Yeah." he said quietly, then, to the audience, back in his register: "The Incredible Hulk. Two weeks. You heard it from the man himself and also from the foam."
He gestured at the figure.
The figure stared at the audience.
The audience gave it a round of applause.
Karl stood up to take a bow on the foam Hulk's behalf, which was not something anyone had planned and which became, in the way of things that are not planned.
The image that ran on every entertainment news site the following morning above headlines that ranged from:
Karl Urban Introduces Hulk's Stand-In to The Most Chaotic Press Appearance of the Year to, on one outlet that Samantha screenshotted and sent to Darren: Why Is There A Foam Man And Why Is It Working.
Tom Holland ended the segment laughing, which he had not entirely planned, which was the best possible outcome, which Regal had known from the moment Karl walked in with the thermocol.
He had known because he had arranged it.
He always read the question list.
….
.
[To be continued…]
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