Chapter Text
A screen appears and there is the following scenario: A tumultuous street on a hot night in 1925. It's outside the Royale Theater, where it just happened the premiere of an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, debuting none other than the great heartthrob of his time: Arthur James Kirkland.
A zoom in the image shows the face of Arthur Kirkland, our protagonist. He has a jovial and cheerful face and is waving to his fans outside the movie theater. Arthur Kirkland is a twenty-one-year-old beta. A single look already reveals he has all the beauty features ideal for his time: a mix of traces of omega and alpha, with large shoulders and some muscles, but also a slender body and some curves.
Many omegas in the crowd shout out his name, trying to get his attention. He's a sex symbol, after all, and he's particularly well-dressed that day with a tailored brown suit and a nice hat. Little did alphas and other betas among his fans know that they too would have a chance with this handsome actor. Arthur Kirkland swings both… actually, all the ways. He just wants to have fun.
A journalist approaches Arthur as he walks on the red carpet, just about to get into his car.
"I just saw your movie and let me tell you! I'm sure it will be another great success! You're a perfect Romeo! There's no doubt about it!"
"Why, thank you very much. You are too kind," Arthur smiles politely.
"Am I detecting a British accent?" the journalist asks in surprise. Arthur's accent is always a surprise to his audience since the movies he works on don’t require him to use his voice. Over time, it has become tedious to always explain how he came to move from England to America to every new journalist who met him, and now he just avoids the subject.
"I must go now. Do you have any questions about the movie?" he asks, looking impatiently at his pocket watch.
"Yes, I do!" she says, taking a notepad out of her pocket and beginning to write on it. "What do you have to say about the movie that everyone is talking about? You know, 'A singer at the piano. '"
Oh yeah. “A singer at the piano”. That movie that had actors talking on it. Big bloody deal.
Arthur's agent had asked him not to speak on the subject. The movie was a huge hit. Possibly, more of those ‘talkies’ would be produced and maybe eventually Arthur would have to be part of them. Therefore, it isn’t the greatest idea for him to say what he really thinks about this kind of film.
Still, he can subtly let his opinion on the general subject recorded, alright?
"Oh, pardon me. I don’t know more about the movie other than the fact that, well, actors speak in it. For some reason, this seems to be the only aspect that has caught everyone's attention about it,” Arthur smiles sardonically. He's pulling his limits and he's aware of it. However, he can’t resist taking the opportunity to vent a bit about his disdain for how enchanted the audiences were with something so silly. "If you want my honest opinion, I think ..."
Before Arthur says something that would destroy his chances of getting a job in the next few years, he is interrupted by the voice of a child shouting his name and the mother of the child in question quarreling with him and telling him to behave.
Arthur always tries to be particularly kind to children, even though he is rather clumsy with them. He had had a very difficult childhood and the few adult figures who paid attention and respect to him had a great positive impact on his life. Remembering them, he always makes an effort to be considerate of his younger fans.
Leaving the journalist aside, he approaches the boy and his mother. He has bright, curious eyes and is holding tightly to the safety fence that separates him from the red carpet as if he would break it with his hands if he could.
"Arthur Kirkland?!" the boy asks in a gasping voice. "Are you THE Arthur Kirkland?!"
"Yes, that would be me," Arthur laughs, holding out his hand to the boy. It's a bit of an adult gesture. Despite his good intentions, Arthur simply doesn’t know how to deal with children, after all.
The boy completely ignores his hand.
"Wow! I can’t believe! You're even cooler up-close! Just wait until the other kids in my school know that I've met THE Arthur Kirkland!"
The boy's mother gives an apologetic smile to Arthur and explains in a slightly embarrassed voice:
"He's a big fan... He watched all your movies. He has many posters of your adventure movies in his bedroom. He says his dream is to become a hero like you."
Arthur smiles sincerely at this. He is glad he is being a good influence for the kids, even if it is just through his fictional characters. In the movies, Arthur was always the hero. A noble figure, brave and full of ideals, always ready to save the day. He thinks it’s swell that even if in real life he is a dull flawed person, thanks to the movies, he could inspire kids to become much better people than him.
"Is all that true?" he checks with the boy, pointing to his mother.
"Yes, sir! One day, I want to be in a movie with you!" the boy says, clenching his fists in excitement. Oh, so he was saying he wanted to be a hero in the same sense that Arthur was a hero. A movie hero. Huh…
"How old are you?"
“Eleven!”
“Very well. I started acting when I was your age, so if you start working hard on your acting now, maybe you can share a screen with me in ten years,” Arthur pats the boy’s head.
The boy seems surprisingly excited by this realistic consolation.
"I'll do my best, sir!" he promises.
With that said, Arthur feels that his duty as a good figure of influence to the children is done and says goodbye to the boy and his mother, starting to walk away. However, the boy holds his arm in place and request repetitively:
"Please! Please give me an autograph, Mr. Kirkland!"
Oh, blimey. An autograph, of course! How could he forget the essentials?
"Yes, of course! Do you have something for me to autograph?"Arthur asks.
The boy doesn’t have anything. The mother desperately searches for something in her purse in which Arthur can write and find nothing. The boy makes a huge pout, looking immensely frustrated.
Arthur has to improvise to solve the problem. He takes a cigarette case out of the top pocket of his coat, puts the last cigarette of it in his mouth and gestures for the boy's mother to pass her pen to him.
"What's your name, boy?" he asks, opening the package to use the paper from the inside to write.
"Alfred! Alfred John Ford!" little Alfred says enthusiastically.
'To Alfred John Ford, a boy with big dreams, my sincere wishes that they come true. From Arthur James Kirkland”, Arthur writes in the package and Alfred receives it as if it’s gold falling into his hands.
With the satisfaction of making a child smile, Arthur happily goes home, to spend some time with his cats and a bottle of moonshine.
Arthur Kirkland has never forgotten the details of that night, for it turned out to be the last one in which he got out at good spirits of a premiére.
The movie he criticized in his premiere eventually became an influence on the entire movie industry. Despite his and other actors' resistance to talkies, they proved to be a great financial success, and in the end, that was what interested the studios.
From that year on, they slowly but inevitably started replacing silent films. Artists who couldn’t accept progress were gradually being left behind. Arthur didn’t want to be one of those.
Although he thought that talkies limited his ability to perform, he did his best to stay in movie theaters and to get used to having to act while always considering the position of the microphone. However, it wasn’t his now limited potential in front of the cameras the real reason why Arthur's career declined, though. It was something he couldn’t exactly control… His accent.
His unmistakably British accent, apparently, didn’t go well with American movie scripts. Whenever he applied for the male lead role, the director said, "Excuse me, but this isn’t an English hero," or "This character isn’t the posh type, you know?" There was a certain image that Americans naturally projected into a character with an English accent and this image wasn’t of a brave protagonist, willing to face all kinds of danger. For some reason, Americans just thought everything he said was fancy. Even when Arthur was swearing, people still thought that what he said was fancy. That was fucking bollocks.
Arthur could have tried to disguise his accent by taking diction classes, but he decided not to go that route. He was proud of his accent. He had to leave England behind but he didn’t want to leave his English identity behind.
With Arthur and other famous male leads of his time having trouble getting jobs, a new wave of actors emerged alongside with a new parameter of male beauty.
In the old days, a movie star was usually a beta. The subtlety of their physical traces was considered charming. Now tall, muscular alphas were considered an epitome of beauty. A physical type drastically different from the one in which Arthur fit and something that definitely didn’t help his return to the screens.
Arthur Kirkland spent three years without a job. He was always mindful of his expenses and had a modest lifestyle and that ensured he didn’t go broke at the time. Still, it was so damn depressing to be simply spending all day at home, drinking bottles and bottles of fake rum, with his cats walking over his lap and meowing worriedly. Cinema was his passion. He had to go back to the big screens.
The only way for Arthur to continue in the movies was to abandon his usual prominent position and accept to reinvent himself as an actor and that he did. He soon discovered that for some reason his accent wasn’t that big of a thing when the role he was looking for was that of a villain.
He knocked on the door of every studio that had a new movie and in need of someone for the role of villain, and little by little he managed to rebuild his career. At thirty-one, Arthur Kirkland was no longer a household name, but he was always called when someone wanted an actor who could make a good villain with few scenes. He became known for hardly refusing a role and for getting good scenes in a few takes.
Unfortunately, often the roles he had to do were simply ridiculous. When he was younger, he never thought he would do a flat as a board character, with a cliche evil laughter and a ridiculous fake mustache, who wanted to blow up a protagonist with a bomb that would be activated when a mouse chewed a rope that made a glass ball gets released and broken on the ground, scaring a horse that would kick in a button positioned just behind him that activated said bomb.
His golden days were far gone.
The second scene of our story takes place in a dressing room with various costumes in the background and a dressing table with a huge mirror and makeup items everywhere, occupied by Arthur Kirkland and a young woman with a focused look, who is standing behind him, putting gel on his hair.
Arthur Kirkland's appearance is different from the first scene of this story. He has a few lines of expression on the forehead, deep dark circles under his eyes and one or two wrinkles close to them. Not bad for a villain.
Arthur is reading his screenplay while the woman behind him tries to give a bizarre-villainesque shape to his golden hair strands.
The camera zooms over Arthur's shoulder, allowing us to see the movie title in the script “ Jonathan Harker vs. Dracul a”, as well as the names of part of the cast written on it.
Arthur passes his finger by the name of the male lead, thoughtfully.
"Alfred F. Jones, eh? This kid seems to be getting a bunch of parts all of a sudden. Who did he sleep with?" he comments more to himself than to the hairdresser, but as he said it out loud, she takes it as an opening to start a conversation.
"Particularly, I like his movies," she admits smiling. "He's very attractive."
"Being attractive just reinforces my theory that he must be sleeping with someone up there," Arthur points out acidly, absently flipping through the pages of the script. Most of the lines and best scenes belong to the hero, even though the villain is also in the title, Arthur silently notices.
"Oh, I don’t think that's it! They say Alfred is a very pure-hearted person!" the hairdresser says, putting more tufts of Arthur's hair up. He looks like he has two big horns now. "From what I've heard, Mr. Jones doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink, and is always a gentleman to omegas. He's considered the kind of guy a mother would love to have as a son-in-law!"
“Well, either that's all a part he’s playing or this is the blandest Hollywood star ever," Arthur laughs dryly, letting the script on the table again. "How much gel do you plan to spend on my hair, by the way? I feel it must have turned a rock by now."
"Don’t worry! I'm done!” the hairdresser laughs, taking her hands off his hair and putting them on his shoulders.
Arthur looks at himself in the mirror and wonders if this is a joke.
His hair looks like a giant V letter. It's absolutely ridiculous.
“… Bloody hell..”
"With the proper makeup, that hair will look more natural on you. I promise,” the hairdresser tries to comfort him with a small smile that somehow manages to blend pity, guilt and a hint of debauchery at the same time.
"I hope so. Frankly, I have a hard time believing that Jonathan Harker would trust me enough to live in my mansion if my current look is the first impression he will have of me.”
Someone knocks on the dressing room door as soon as he finishes this joke.
"Is Mr. Kirkland there?" someone asks, it’s a young man judging by the voice.
Arthur sighs. For someone to come and bother him so early in the dressing room, it can only be a problem.
“Yes, I am,” he quickly answers.
A small moment of silence occurs before the same person adds the question:
“Can I come in?”
Arthur and the hairdresser exchange confused looks. He gives a look that clearly expresses the question "should I let this person in?" and the lady, in response, simply shrugs, with a “why would I know?" sort of face.
"Yes, but please don’t delay too long. I'm still getting ready for my scene," Arthur ends up saying.
And then, the person opens the door and Arthur can’t help but stare at him, with his mouth agape. Oh, lord. That is a handsome lad in front of his eyes. Despite getting to know several conventionally attractive people in his line of job, few of them had that breathtaking effect on Arthur. The man who got in is just that handsome.
The visitor is a young man, wearing a navy blue suit and red tie. He is strong, tall and has broad shoulders. He has a laid-back, confident way of walking, with his hands in his pants’ pockets. He seems absolutely like someone Arthur would gladly accept in his bed.
Who is this guy? He can only be an actor. Also, he would take too much attention from the public to be a secondary character, so he is probably that Jones fella. Shit, the rumors were real. He is attractive.
He arrives in front of Arthur and, to his surprise, puts his arm in the sides of his chair, leaning a bit too close to his face.
"Mr. Kirkland?" he asks with such an endearing smile that Arthur can’t even articulate the words to comment on the importance of his personal space.
"... Yes, it's me," Arthur replies, clearing his throat and averting his gaze.
"Oh goodness me! I can’t believe it! It is really you!” the man says, shaking his shoulders enthusiastically. Arthur feels a bit dizzy for a lot of reasons. "To be honest, I didn’t even want to get into such a cheap production as this, because I had received another offer from a great director recently, but when I saw the name of the actor who would play Dracula, I thought 'it can’t be Arthur Kirkland, the old actor, can it?' Haha! I had to check it out! I ended up only accepting the part for your sake, so I'm glad to see it was really you! "
…
A cheap production with an old actor, huh?
An acidic feeling began to bubble up inside Arthur. Everything that that guy had said was probably true, but it was hard to hear something like that.
"Why did you want to act with me so badly, Mr. Whoever-the-hell-you-are?" Arthur asks, raising his eyes and taking his visitor's hands off his shoulder. He feels quite immune to his charms now.
"I'm an old fan of yours," the young man says smiling and putting his hands in his pockets again. "Do you remember your premiére of Romeo and Juliet ten years ago?”
Arthur remembers that night but he’s confused by this mention. The bloke in front of him looks a bit young to remember this event himself.
"You look confused. I can see you’re not recognizing me," his visitor laughs. “I don’t blame you for that. You had a lot of fans at that time, after all, and I was just one of them."
Had.
Acidic bubbles form in a greater intensity within Arthur. He grinds his teeth a little, making a quiet effort to hold his tongue. He knows he has to keep his composure. He would only humiliate himself if he tried to counter that.
"Do you remember a child who asked for an autograph at the premiere? Alfred John Ford?"
Not only does Arthur remember this moment, but specific scenes of that night begin to run through his mind the instant his visitor says that name.
One day, I want to be in a movie with you!
I started acting when I was your age, so if you start working hard on your acting now, maybe you can share a screen with me in ten years.
Shit. No, no. Why this? Why now?
This memory has always been a place of comfort for Arthur. The memory of the premiere of the last successful movie he was in. He wanted to keep his past and present separated for a reason. Now, an old fan was seeing him in a cheap production, fully aware that Arthur could do no better. An old fan was seeing him in that ridiculous hair.
Even worse…
"My agent thought John Ford didn’t sound that good," he said with a chuckle. "So we played around with some letters and I ended up becoming Alfred F. Jones."
His old fan… had taken Arthur's place.