….
The silence in the LIE Studios executive suite was heavy, the kind of stillness that usually followed a massive commercial storm.
[Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire] had just completed its theatrical run, closing at a staggering $1.3 billion global gross.
By every measurable standard, it was a triumph.
But the numbers couldn't fill the void left by Richard Harris. That wound was still open, and everyone working on the project knew it.
However, before that comes another major issue.
Finding a new director who can replace Chris Columbus.
Regal Seraphsail sat at the head of the table, fingers laced, watching the woman across from him.
"What do you say, Lena? Are you up for it?"
Lena Crawford studied the man for a moment before dropping her gaze to the script sitting between them.
[Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire].
The [Friends] show had been a huge success for Lena.
And as a woman who dreamed too big for Hollywood, she had already achieved a lot she had initially ever imagined in her life.
[Friends] production was currently a global phenomenon for NBC and Netflix, pulling in over 18.2 million viewers per episode.
The sitcom had become the heartbeat of the studio's television division, filmed on the meticulously designed Central Perk set in Los Angeles.
Currently, it is #1 show on television.
It was only possible because of two men in her life.
Her husband, and the relatively young man in front of her, who for the first time believed in her.
If she was being honest with herself, she was satisfied. Content, even. She didn't need this.
However, as she looked at Regal.
All she could see was confidence and trust in her.
'…sigh, how could I possibly turn this down?' she wondered.
"Okay." she said. "I am in."
Regal's expression didn't change, but something in the room shifted. "Excellent. Welcome aboard, Director."
"Thanks for having me."
"To keep Friends stable during the transition, I am moving the show to a rotating director system. Marta Kauffman and David Crane will manage it from the showrunner level - the structure is solid enough to hold."
He paused. "Wrap up whatever needs wrapping up on your end, then come join the production team."
"Understood. I will make it clean."
She began to rise from her chair.
"One more thing." Regal said. "Sit back down. This one requires your honest read."
Lena settled back into her seat. "What is it?"
His tone shifted. "We need to address the anchor. Richard Harris can't be replaced, not really. But the role still has to be filled."
He reached across the mahogany table and slid a single headshot toward her.
Lena looked down, and so did Samantha who had been standing there silently.
Her eyes went wide.
Ross Oakley.
"Ross?" Samanatha looked up sharply. "Regal. You are serious?"
The reaction was entirely expected.
Even after seeing herself firsthand working with Ross on [Death Note] and [Superman].
Even after most of Smanatha's early assumptions about him had been dismantled one project at a time, certain impressions clung.
He was a man of fierce precision and considerable pride.
Where Richard Harris had embodied warmth and gentle authority - a grandfather the whole world wanted - Ross Oakley occupied an entirely different register.
"Of course. I am certain." Regal said.
And he meant it.
Finding a replacement for Dumbledore wasn't the impossible task people made it out to be. There was no shortage of distinguished actors who could wear the robes, carry the staff, and deliver the lines with appropriate gravitas.
That part was manageable.
What was close to impossible was replacing Richard Harris specifically - that particular alchemy of warmth, melancholy, and effortless authority that had made his Dumbledore feel less like a performance and more like the real thing.
Harris hadn't played the role, he had simply been it.
That was the gap no casting decision could fully close.
But with Ross, Regal believed he could at least narrow it.
Ross Oakley possessed none of what the industry casually referred to as a unique gift - the kind of indefinable natural magnetism that someone like Stephen Hawking Sr. had carried since his first screen test, the quality that made certain careers feel almost inevitable in hindsight.
Ross had no such inheritance, innate charm, effortless presence, nothing that had simply arrived with him.
What Ross had instead was something rarer in its own way: an almost pathological work ethic, and an uncanny ability to inhabit other people.
Regal had a quiet theory about where that skill came from.
He suspected Ross had never attended a formal acting school - that virtually everything he knew about the craft had been absorbed through obsessive, granular study of the actors he admired.
He had learned by watching, by copying.
Reverse-engineering performances until he understood not just the what but the why behind every choice.
For a man like that, mimicking Richard Harris wasn't just possible.
It was almost a natural assignment.
But that was where the logic ran into its sharpest obstacle.
"He might take it as an insult."
Lena's voice was measured, but the warning carried weight.
She didn't need to elaborate.
The subtext was plain enough - Ross had spent his entire career living in the shadow of Stephen Hawking Sr., perpetually measured against a standard he hadn't set and couldn't escape.
Handing him the most iconic wise old man role in contemporary cinema - a role that, by industry instinct, belonged to a Hawking-tier legend - wasn't just a casting decision.
To Ross, it might read as a provocation.
A reminder of everything the world still didn't think he was.
Regal was quiet for a moment, and then a faint smirk crossed his face - the involuntary kind, called up by a specific memory.
"I am willing to take my chances." he said.
….
.
[A Week Later]
The thing about Keanu was that he never asked.
Most people, when they knew something was coming - when they could sense it in the atmosphere around a person, in the way a project kept not being mentioned even as everything adjacent to it got made, would eventually ask.
Would find a casual way to bring it up and test the temperature.
Keanu never asked - he had been waiting for five years with the particular patience of someone who had decided that the thing would arrive when it was ready and that asking about it was the same as opening the oven door.
They were in Regal's office at LIE, late afternoon, the kind that turned the room gold.
Keanu had come just as Regal asked him to, without a question.
Regal was at his desk, not working, or not appearing to work. His pen was in his hand but it hadn't moved in a while.
Keanu turned a page.
Outside, someone in the corridor laughed at something.
"There is a man." Regal said, without looking up. "Who is very good at killing people. He was going to stop. He had a reason to stop, a real one. And then someone took the one thing that made stopping feel possible."
He paused. "And everything that follows is about what a person does when the life they chose to leave keeps finding them."
Keanu stopped chewing.
He didn't look up immediately, he finished the bite he was on, which was the response of someone whose body was continuing normally while the rest of him was catching up to what he'd just heard.
Then he closed the book, not bothering to mark the page.
"What's his name." Keanu said, not a question exactly - more like the first step of something.
"John Wick."
It's the same name Regal had used to save his contact number in his phone.
Keanu looked at Regal across the office with an expression that was doing several things at once, the recognition of something long-anticipated, and underneath it, something quieter, the thing that actors feel when a character finds them rather than the other way around.
Keanu picked up his apple, looked at it and put it back down.
"When?" he said.
"Pre-production will finish in a month or so and the shooting should be done by the end of the year."
A pause, then Keanu smiled, the small private one that appeared when something was genuinely good.
Regal stood up from his desk. "Come here."
"Why?"
"Because I am going to post something and you need to be in it."
Keanu stood, mildly suspicious in the way he was mildly suspicious of most things Regal asked him to do on short notice, which had historically been a reasonable stance.
They stood together near the window, the gold afternoon light coming in at an angle that was, Regal noted, genuinely good without being arranged.
He held up his phone.
The photo was slightly off-center because Regal had never quite mastered the selfie, which Keanu had pointed out to him twice before and which Regal continued to be indifferent about.
They were both looking at the camera.
Regal had the expression of a man who has been waiting to say something for a very long time and has finally said it.
Keanu looked, as he often looked in unguarded photographs, like a person who was somewhere he was glad to be.
Regal looked at it and posted it.
….
@RegalSeraphsail
[photo]
Finally.
NOTE: Don't hurt anyone's dog.
….
The post went up at 4:47 PM on a Sunday.
By 4:49 it had been screenshotted, cropped, enlarged, and was moving across every platform simultaneously in the frantic way that things move when they confirm something people have been waiting to hear confirmed.
The fans who had been cataloguing every Keanu-Regal interaction since [Following] - and there were more of them than either man knew, organised into corners of the internet with their own taxonomies and timelines and theories, understood what the photo meant before the tagline even registered.
When the tagline registered, it got considerably louder.
Don't hurt anyone's dog generated two hundred thousand responses in the first hour, which ranged from people who immediately understood the reference and reacted accordingly.
And to people who didn't yet understand it but could tell from the energy of the room that they were going to want to, to approximately forty-seven journalists who filed pieces within ninety minutes under headlines that all amounted to the same thing:
[Regal Seraphsail and Keanu Reeves are making something. We don't know what yet. We know enough.]
Samantha saw it from her car on the way home, pulled over, and texted Regal:
[You could have told me first.]
He replied: [You would have wanted a press strategy.]
She replied: [That's how things are supposed to be done.]
He replied: [The strategy was one photo and six words and it worked.]
She looked at the notifications climbing on the post.
She put her phone away and pulled back into traffic.
He wasn't wrong.
….
.
[To be continued…]
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