Hollywood: Lights, Ink, Entertainment!-Chapter 362: First Interview

....

It was no shoot day for the team of [I Want To Eat Your Pancreas].

Instead the main team was scheduled to have lunch.

The lunch had been Samantha’s idea, which meant it wasn’t really a lunch.

It was an interview that happened to involve appetizers.

The journalist’s name was Kite Otto, wrote for Prestige Weekly, and this was technically an unrecorded video interview.

The structure was deliberate - Tom and Zendaya were young, relatively inexperienced with press, and Regal wanted them comfortable with media interactions before the actual promotional run started.

....

They arrived in two cars.

Regal and Samantha first, which gave them four minutes to settle and review the agreed-upon boundaries with Kite before Tom and Zendaya showed up together.

Apparently they had been running the same errand that morning, something Tom had needed a co-conspirator for, the details of which Zendaya had texted Samantha with a simple ’don’t ask’ which naturally made Samantha want to ask but professionalism won out.

Kite Otto was already at the table when they arrived.

"Mr. Seraphsail." he said, extending his hand. "Thanks for making time for this."

"Kite." Regal replied, sitting down as menus materialized from somewhere, the ambient noise of West Hollywood’s lunch crowd settling around them.

Tom and Zendaya arrived three minutes later, and Tom, being Tom, spotted the table, made eye contact with Kite, and immediately launched into what could only be described as an introduction that was trying very hard.

"Hi! Tom Holland, I am playing Elliot, he’s the—well, he’s one of the leads, actually he’s the main character, or one of them anyway because there are two main characters technically, so I guess co-lead would be more accurate—"

Kite looked at him with an expression that suggested he had been told this lunch would be interesting and was now actively believing it. "Kite Otto. I know who you are."

"Oh! You do?" Tom seemed genuinely surprised by this. "That’s great because honestly I didn’t know who you were until this morning when Samantha gave me the briefing, and apparently you’re kind of a big deal in your field, which makes sense given you are here interviewing us, and I’m sorry that probably sounded rude saying I didn’t know you but I figured honesty was better than pretending—"

"Tom." Zendaya said gently, sitting down with considerably more grace.

"Right. Stopping now."

Kite was already smiling, the kind of smile journalists get when they realize they’re dealing with someone who hasn’t learned to be boring yet. "I appreciate the honesty, actually - it’s rarer than you would think in this industry."

Tom reached for his water glass slightly too quickly. "Great restaurant."

Zendaya extended her hand across the table to Kite with the kind of composure that made her seem older than twenty. "Zendaya. Nice to meet you."

"Likewise." Kite said, shaking her hand.

"Actually, we have a small request before we start, if you don’t mind."

"Of course."

"If Tom happens to say something he is not supposed to during the interview, and I am not saying he will, but statistically speaking there is a non-zero chance - would you mind not including it in the article?"

It was clearly meant as a polite request.

Kite hesitated.

He looked at Tom again.

The boy didn’t seem rude or reckless in any obvious way, which made the warning slightly confusing. Naturally, the most obvious interpretation was that they were referring to something inappropriate - perhaps an offhand comment or a careless remark that might sound bad in print.

But Zendaya didn’t seem worried about rudeness.

She looked more like someone preparing damage control in advance.

"I am not sure I understand." Kite admitted.

Regal answered before she could.

Regal replied calmly. "You will understand soon enough. Though ideally, it won’t come to that - because if it does, it means that even after several reminders, he still ended up saying something he shouldn’t."

That explanation only made Kite more puzzled.

He glanced at Tom again, trying to figure out what exactly they were worried about.

What, exactly, was this mysterious thing Tom wasn’t supposed to say?

"I am not that bad." Tom protested.

"You told the PA the entire plot of the film on day two." Zendaya countered.

"She asked!"

"She asked how your day was going."

Only then did it finally click for Kite.

They weren’t worried about rude comments.

They were worried about - spoilers.

Kite pressed his lips together, clearly trying not to laugh.

"Understood." he said. "Anything Tom accidentally reveals about the story stays off the record unless you approve it."

"Thank you." Samantha said, visibly relieved.

....

Kite started with Regal, which made strategic sense - establish the film’s context through the director before getting to the actors who would actually have to embody it.

"So, Mr. Seraphsail. Are you sure the film isn’t a biological mystery beneath the love story you are selling to the audience."

"I would never do that."

"Would’nt you?"

"I promise."

"Fine. I will believe you. Now moving onto my next question–

"You are a director, producer, cinematographer, obviously a writer, but recently you have added an actor to that list. Should I be calling you an actor now?"

Regal smiled, understanding immediately what Kite was referencing - the bartender role he had played in [Friends], the one that had somehow gotten more attention than he’d anticipated. "I would still prefer the director."

"Understood. So should I assume directing is the priority and everything else - especially acting - is essentially a side project?"

"Yes."

"That brings me to the obvious question then." Kite continued, leaning forward slightly. "Why act at all? And please don’t give me a generic answer - I am talking to one of the most creative directors in Hollywood, I would like to think you can do better than ’it seemed fun.’"

"I was absolutely about to say it seemed fun." Regal admitted. "But since you are asking for something more substantive, let me pose a question back: how many people do you think actually know who I am?"

Kite considered this. "A lot, I would imagine."

"Yeah a lot.’" Regal pressed. "Industry people, sure. Film critics, journalists, people who pay attention to who directs what - they know me. But take a random person, someone who doesn’t follow Hollywood news, who just watches movies because they enjoy them, who couldn’t tell you who directed the last three films they saw - does that person know who Regal Seraphsail is?"

"Probably not." Kite conceded.

"Right. But they would know Robert Downey Jr. When this film comes out, they will know Tom Holland in the future." Regal gesturing to Tom, who looked simultaneously pleased and alarmed by the attention. "Actors have a reach that directors simply don’t, at least not with general audiences who don’t care about the names behind the camera, only the faces on screen."

"So this is about expanding your recognition?" Kite asked, making a note.

"It’s about expanding the reach of the work." Regal clarified. "The more people recognize me, the more likely they are to pay attention when I make something new, which means the films I care about get seen by audiences who might not have sought them out otherwise. It’s not about ego - it’s about distribution of attention."

"Is that the only reason?"

"There’s another component." Regal said, his expression shifting to something that might have been amusement. "You know I appeared on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire once, right?"

"I do."

"After that aired, the old woman who lives near me recognized me for the first time." Regal said, and there was genuine humor in his voice now–

"Mind you, by that point I had already made a billion-dollar movie [Harry Potter] had been out for years - but it wasn’t until she saw me on a game show that she knew who I was. That told me something important about the difference between being known for your work and being known as a person people actually see."

The table laughed at that, even Kite, who was clearly enjoying this more than he had expected to.

....

Kite was good at his job - this became clear within the first ten minutes as he moved seamlessly from softball opening questions about finding the project and being drawn to the material into territory that was considerably less comfortable.

He had asked Regal about the budget first, the nine million figure that had been in the initial trade announcements, and Regal had answered straightforwardly without evasion because the budget was what it was and there was no point being coy about publicly available information.

Then Kite had nodded, made a note, and said something that made the entire table recalibrate: "There is a school of thought - and I am curious what you make of it, that a director coming off something like [Superman] choosing to do a nine-million-dollar character piece reads as a step down, commercially speaking."

The table went quiet for just a beat too long.

Regal looked at Kite with the expression he used when someone had said something worth responding to carefully rather than dismissively. "Who’s the school?"

"Studio people, mostly. A few executives I have spoken with, off the record."

"Mm." Regal picked up his water glass, set it back down without drinking. "Let me ask you something: what do you think the average lifespan of a superhero franchise is?"

Kite tilted his head, recognizing this was going somewhere. "I don’t know. Ten years?"

"Fifteen if you’re lucky, maybe twenty if it’s genuinely exceptional and the culture doesn’t move on." Regal said, his tone carrying no bitterness, just the precision of someone who’d thought about this extensively–

"Then the audience shifts, tastes change, and the entire architecture you spent years building becomes a museum piece that people reference nostalgically but don’t actually want to revisit. I made [Superman]. I am proud of it. I will probably make more films in that world because the stories interest me.

"But if Superman is the only register I can work in, the only kind of film people expect from me, then I am not a director anymore - I am a brand extension, and brand extensions don’t make art, they make products."

Kite wrote this down, and Tom - who had been listening with the focused intensity of someone filing everything away for later analysis - nodded very seriously, then seemed to realize he was nodding and stopped.

Kite noticed, turned his attention to Tom with the smooth pivot of someone who’d found his next angle. "What about you, Tom? You came to this from theater with essentially no film credits, which makes you the youngest debut Regal’s introduced in a leading role - excluding the [Harry Potter] cast, obviously. How does someone go from a London theater to a Regal Seraphsail film?"

Tom opened his mouth, paused, looked briefly at Regal as if checking whether he was allowed to answer this, then dove in.

"Honestly? I still don’t entirely know. I auditioned, which I almost didn’t do because I assumed there was no way they would cast someone with my complete lack of film experience, but my agent convinced me to try anyway, and then I did this scene from the script.

"It’s a library scene where Elliot first talks to Sakura - and apparently I didn’t completely embarrass myself because they called me back, and then I did another scene, and then somehow I was cast, and I am still sort of waiting for someone to realize they made a mistake and recast the role with someone who actually knows what they’re doing—"

"Tom." Zendaya said quietly.

"Right. Stopping again." He looked at Kite apologetically. "Sorry, I tend to ramble when I am nervous."

"Don’t apologize." Kite said, making notes that Tom couldn’t see. "It’s refreshing. Most actors I interview have learned to give carefully constructed answers that don’t actually say anything - you’re giving me actual insight into how you think."

"Is that good or bad?" Tom asked.

"For me? Very good. For your publicist?" Kite glanced at Samantha. "Possibly concerning."

Samantha just smiled, the smile of someone who had already made peace with managing Tom Holland’s relationship with the media.

....

.

[To be continued...]

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