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fnniganthomas · 4 years

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❝ in my mind I am eloquent; I can climb intricate scaffolds of words. but when I open my mouth, everything collapses. ❞

{ cis man, he/him } ❝ icarus is forever deemed the boy who flew too close to the sun and got burned. to me, he is just a boy too enthralled by beauty to care whether or not it could hurt him. ❞ huh, who’s TAYLOR ZAKHAR PEREZ? no, you’re mistaken, that’s actually LEANDER FINNIGAN-THOMAS. he is a 23 year old HALF-BLOOD wizard who is a TATTOO ARTIST. he is known for being RETICENT, SELF-CONSCIOUS, STUBBORN, INARTICULATE, and PERSUADABLE but also TRUSTING, SYMPATHETIC, EARNEST, PERCEPTIVE, and QUICK-THINKING, so that must be why he always reminds me of the song EPITAPH BY HIPPO CAMPUS and THE SMELL OF HOMEMADE BROWNIES BAKING; TECHNICOLOR PAINT STAINS ON EVERYTHING YOU OWN; A SKY GONE GREEN WITH PROMISED RAIN; WORN FLANNELS YOU’RE HAPPY TO LET OTHERS BORROW; A LUMP IN YOUR THROAT FROM THE WORDS YOU SWALLOW. i hear he is aligned with THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX, so be sure to keep an eye on him. { zoe, 22, cst, she/her } [ leander is adopted. ]

ADDITIONAL MATERIALS: leander’s playlist, stats page, & pinterest board CHARACTER PARALLELS: jason mendoza (the good place), chidi anagonye (the good place), ty lee (atla), finn (star wars), troy barnes (community), brittany pierce (glee), ponyboy curtis (the outsiders), aang (atla)

one.

there was no real doubt in anyone’s mind that leander was his fathers’ son. even the two of them had no trouble seeing bits of the other in him.

dean could be heard calling leander seamus’ son when he ran into the side table holding lit candles and set several wooden picture frames ablaze. seamus returned the favor and referred to leander as dean’s son when he walked into leander’s room and saw he’d upended several jars of paint on the floor. to this day, none of them could really say if he’d upended the jars on purpose or not.

leander liked to think it was on purpose, even as he proclaimed his innocence every time the family told the story over laughter-filled dinners. proclaiming his innocence was just part of the way that story got told and he couldn’t go breaking tradition. really, he liked the way the rainbow of colors was still burrowed into the grooves of the wood and the slats between floorboards, even after countless attempts at cleaning the last of it. a part of him wondered if that hadn’t been an early sign of magic; he knew that that paint washed easily out of his hair and off his closes, but it stuck stubbornly to the floor right where he liked it.

the colors on the floor nearly matched the technicolor quilt that lay on top of his bed year-round. he liked when things matched like that, almost by accident; like the world liked when things looked pretty as much as he did. he kinda hoped that was one of his first bits of magic; it felt fitting. he said as much to his gran once and had his hair ruffled for his trouble.

two.

when he was a child, he was always elbow deep in some messy thing. it wasn’t that he had a knack for causing trouble — he just had such a hard time saying no to trouble when it came calling. he had a hard time saying no to anything that came calling.

that was probably why trouble was always calling him. it knew he was an easy mark.

he made friends easily as a child, when things were easier and no one seemed to mind or care that he had such a hard time finding the words for things. leander was too polite to voice the blame out loud, but he was convinced that his friends growing up were at least half behind all the messes he got into.

the other kids around him might’ve been better at causing messes, but leander made up for it by being a mess. he was always having a crisis as a kid — his stuffed dragons were just ravaging the block city, dad, but what about the finger puppet people formerly houses in that block tower? do they even sell dinosaur insurance?? why didn’t I think of the implications here …

he and his sister played knights a lot, with toy swords and helmets modeled after the suits of armor in hogwarts (dean asked seamus if that wasn’t a little much, when they bought them; they were a few years out from school, after all, they didn’t care that the helmets were accurate — ) and leander always wondered about the ramifications of two knights fighting each other. shouldn’t they be friends, he thought? she always took his ensuing rambling full of hypothetical knight-schisms as opportunity to knock him flat backwards.

he was a needy kid — he always had questions at his lips, a thousand things he wanted to say. it took him forever to find the way to say them, though; leander hated feeling any negative thing, but he was used to frustration turned inward. it was his least favorite feeling, and one he was all too accustomed to. even now, leander was never quite sure what to do with his words. his mind was an easy enough place for him to navigate, and he loved being there for others when they needed someone to listen.

but whenever he tried talking himself wires got crossed and nothing came out how he wanted it to.

three.

he’d always been more quiet than he’d have liked to be, because he did actually have a lot to say. by the time he was nearly hogwarts-aged, he’d mostly forced himself to get over his hang-ups around his family. they poked good-natured fun at him, but he knew they’d always give him as much time as he needed to phrase a sentence or find a word. he could be assured that some of the other kids he’d grown up around would know that he just took a while to say what he really meant, too.

it was the thought of the castle, so full of strangers and professors he didn’t know, that scared him. getting sorted into ravenclaw scared him even more. he knew he didn’t always sound smart, and it worried him that others would listen to him and decide that he wasn’t, actually, smart enough to be a ravenclaw. he knew that he was smart, that he had things of value to offer to conversations. he was just so bad at getting them out the way he wanted to.

he stayed quiet for a while, even knowing he didn’t actually want to be quiet.

whenever he tried to articulate that point to other people though, it tended not to go as well as it did in his head — only proving his point. one of the prefects his first year rolled her eyes, said, ‘if you want to be less quiet, just say more, leander.’ but it wasn’t that easy, for him. he had a lot to say but had trouble finding the words for all those things. he could usually carry polite conversation just fine; fool people into thinking he knew what he was doing. but anything more than that required his total focus, and still was rarely quite right.

he bit down on half-formed questions because he thought it was better to not know some things if it meant he didn’t have to see people grow annoyed at his fumbling words. then that made him feel even more like he was some sort of fraud-ravenclaw — what ravenclaw thought they were better off not knowing things?

just like he forced himself to get over his worries to talk to his family and old friends, he forced himself to accept that words were never going to be his specialty. then he forced himself to be fine with that. he worked hard to focus on the things he was good at, that didn’t require him to talk too much — he always felt at home in the air on his broom, or with a sketchbook in his lap, or in the kitchen whipping up something that’d make other people happy. those things weren’t nothing.

four.

leander was smart, actually; he excelled in herbology and charms and worked hard enough everywhere else to not be singled out during class. he never caused as many explosions as his dad did from simple transfiguration. and he was great with people, for all that he got so in his head sometimes that he felt clumsy with even his dearest friends. but being smart never stopped anyone from being a fool.

when leander looked back on his childhood, it was as if all of his roiling anxieties melted away. it was like looking in on a world encased in the sun — he imagined his memories as some sort of weird, reverse snow globe, where everything shimmered at the edges and only got brighter as you shook it up.

hindsight made even mundane or negative memories seem golden, to leander. his biggest fault was that he always liked to think things were kinder than they actually were.

leander trusted people to be better than they were and was bad at saying what he meant, which was, at times an awful combination for him. he trusted the world to treat him better than it did.

if someone ever tries to convince him that, no, really, that harsh person from a historically bigoted family is not a good person, his stubbornness really came out and saw leander dig his feet in. he never wanted to believe that people had to be truly black or white — he was stubbornly convinced that there was good in every person, even when he was told he shouldn’t try so hard to look for it.

leander knew what was it like to feel you stood on the fringes of everybody else’s lives; no amount of forcing himself to be comfortable with the way he was ever took that anxiety away. he tried his hardest to be accommodating and friendly and understanding to everyone he came into contact with, even the people who maybe didn’t deserve his kindness. especially them, sometimes. he didn’t want anyone feeling like he was someone to be wary around. leander was steadfast in his beliefs and knew he wouldn’t change them, but all the same — that shouldn’t be a reason for someone to look at him and expect anything less than he gave everyone else.

four.

home never stopped being the most comforting place for leander. not even once he was older, a little more settled, and no longer had such stress over belonging in ravenclaw tower. not even once he had plenty of friends, a spot on the quidditch roster, a place in the castle. he adored not feeling so lost at school the older he got, but it couldn’t compete with home.

the golden gleam of his memories made everything feel well-worn and well-loved in his head, but home was the biggest victim, and the most deserving of such treatment. leander was stubbornly adamant that there was no better place in the world than the finnigan-thomas’ home in kenmare. holidays at home with his family, extended and sprawling and filled with family friends as much as blood relatives, were leander’s favorite thing.

he loved his dads so much — even as he couldn’t help but wonder, privately, if they wouldn’t have preferred a son who wasn’t such a fuck up sometimes. he’d certainly caused several dinner parties to grind to a halt with a poorly-phrased question directed at the aunt he forgot he wasn’t supposed to sit next to, after the incident over christmas dinner when he was ten.

leander wondered if his dads wouldn’t want a son who was better at words, because leander always thought there were ways for him to be better. he wondered, privately, because he couldn’t help but worry. but the logical part of his brain knew that there wasn’t a need to worry over them. they loved him, he knew, and didn’t even need his memory to gloss everything over for that to be true.

five.

there was always a level of creativity in the house growing up, and leander took to it like a fish to water. he never really let up on his fascination with color and the physicality of paint clinging to his skin and the paintbrush and whatever canvas was in front of him. the permanently-painted floorboards in his room weren’t the only casualty in the house, but that was alright. no one ever gave leander too much grief over tracking paint everywhere.

it was easier for him to take a pencil to page than to find the words, sometimes, and he was so happy his family understood that about him, and let it grow.

leander couldn’t keep track of how many drawings his dads pinned up to the fridge when he was a kid, or how excited dean had been to lead leander around museums growing up. he cherished every minute seamus spent nodding along as leander rambled about some era in art history seamus knew nothing about. it didn’t matter that leander grew into being comfortable at hogwarts, and around strangers, and people who weren’t so understanding with his fumbled words; it was work, with all of them, even as the work got easier on him.

nothing about being near his family and feeling that love felt like work.

leander, even grown out a childhood-self that worried over the ethics of stuffed dragons knocking over block towers, couldn’t help but be dragged down the whirlpool of hypothetical thoughts. he wondered if there was some alternate-universe leander who wasn’t as lucky as he was, who didn’t have his dads and his sister and his friends. maybe there was a leander who had those things but still lived in a world that was altogether harsher than his was. he thanked the universe as often as he remembered to that he was who he was, and that he was where he was.

leander was bowled over by stress and anxiety and worries more often than he existed in a state of honest chill, but he was still so happy to have the life he did. he didn’t always feel like he deserved it, but he was glad it was his.

six.

when leander was sixteen, he dicked around enough on the internet to teach himself how to give magical tattoos and muggle tattoos both. he really thought that it shouldn’t have been so easy to order all the necessary equipment and have it delivered to his house; he really, really thought that the owl that came bearing his enchanted ink should’ve asked for, like, ID or something. it felt like getting away with something, how easy it was.

leander was well-versed in courting trouble at this point and knew he shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. he just thought it was important to note that he worried at it being so easy for people without training to get all that stuff.

he practiced on himself and his sister, with a little needling and an iron-clad pinkie swear that they’d keep the tattoos a secret from their dads. in hindsight, it was a very stupid decision on leander’s part to start practicing in the summer, when they went to the beach often enough that the two finnigan-thomas kids had to order some fancy witch-owned brand of waterproof concealer to cover the evidence. their dads didn’t notice the tattoos until they came home that winter break and forgot to start hiding them again, though, so leander would take the win.

he offered tattoos to people at school, and really hoped that some of them also forgot to hide them when they went home for winter hols. it felt only fitting that his not-thought-out plan brought some other people a bit of trouble. he’d call it payback for all that time in their childhoods when he’d been the one getting dragged into problems, but the thought of payback as a concept made leander a little sad, so, whatever.

seven.

it felt only fitting that he looked into doing tattoos as a professional once he was out of hogwarts. dean certainly insinuated, when leander mused over the option, that it would make the shock he’d given his dads over the tattoos worth it. leander kind of agreed; he didn’t think the tattoos weren’t worth it, already, but there could be layers to worth. on principle, he loved the idea of practice. he liked to think that everything in life was practice for something to come — that nothing happened to you that couldn’t have a use later down the line.

it had a nice symmetry to it, a circular-ness. it was the sort of lofty thought he’d have an absolute monster of a time voicing out loud, but he felt it, and sometimes that was enough for leander. it was like the paint worn into his floorboards that matched the quilt on his bed; unintentional but fitting anyway.

leander wondered if maybe he shouldn’t look into going to muggle university to study art, or at least take an apprenticeship under a wizarding artist so he could learn how to paint portraits and landscapes that could move and all. there was still a career in that, people looking to have themselves or their relatives or their homes immortalized in oils even as moving photographs were so much easier these days.

he was — definitely, he was interested in learning that sort of thing. it just felt like too big a goal to have for his life right after school was over. he hadn’t been suspended in a state of constant stress during his time at hogwarts, or anything, but h still felt a strong sort of relief when it was over.

there were things he’d miss; how easy it was, having so many of his friends all living in the same place, all doing the same things and living such parallel lives. he’d miss quidditch practice now that he knew he’d never make it as a professional — and never want to, besides. he’d miss the community of it all, even as he recalled how hard it had been for him to settle into it. he knew that it would only take a year or two, maybe less than that, for him to start romanticizing his time there like nothing had ever hurt in the castle’s walls.

but the sigh of relief, that was bigger than anything he missed, and it made him sure he wanted to take a step back from school and any formal training or education. he already knew enough about tattooing now that he felt assured it wouldn’t feel so much like starting over to make a job of it.

eight.

leander was always far better at thinking on his feet than most people would guess from knowing him. it sometimes surprised leander himself, even — he knew he had a propensity towards worry, and it seemed like maybe he shouldn’t actually be good in an emergency. maybe it was just that he had an overactive fight or flight instinct that he’d long trained over the years to fight through whatever it could. he might not be the person people in his life wanted around when they were going through a crisis, but he knew how to handle himself in all manner of unexpected situations. leander liked to think he rarely made things worse.

does he make good choices whilst thinking on his feet? not all the time. but then, who could be relied on to make the perfect decision during every high stress situation they found themselves tossed into? leander made choices, and knew better than to stand idle; leander was of the belief that second guessing things had no value, even as he couldn’t help himself sometimes. he tried his best to face every consequence of every action head on.

he dug his feet in over stupid, foolish decisions often enough. it was fitting that sometimes when he dug his feet in, it was for a purpose. the best way out is through, and all that — maybe he’d get that adage tattooed on him someday, too.

sometimes it still felt like things happened to him, like he was a less active participant in his life than others were in theirs. he’d always pick fight over flight but not every situation asked that choice of him. it was less because he had a genuine go-with-the-flow personality, and more that he had such a hard time saying no.

nine.

when the world around him started turning itself upside down with awfulness and inside out with tragedy, leander knew it wouldn’t do him any good to freeze now. he joined up with the order because he knew there really wasn’t any other option he could take and still look at himself in the mirror. he wasn’t an auror or a healer or anyone that he thought had, like, much of value to offer the cause. but he was asked, and he said yes, because leander always, always said yes when trouble came calling for him. it was instinctive at this point.

leander liked to think he didn’t hate a lot of things. his heart was too open, to full of potential love, for him to like feeling anything harsher than annoyance, frustration. he forced bursts of hurt to come and go in a count of ten, because dwelling on the negative made him feel hollowed out.

but he stopped laying in bed at night so often, thanking his lucky stars that he was leander in this world over any others; he started, instead, wondering if any generation in this world of theirs would get to be untouched by even the threat of war. he wondered if it was too naive to wish this darkness would fade as quickly as it did when his dads were kids.

he turned things over in his memory now that some of the worst had come to pass; normally he let everything be painted in shades of gold, but he wondered if that wasn’t part of the problem. maybe too many people had worked too hard to push prison breaks and strange disappearances to the side — maybe too many people had had wanted to remember things only as happy and bright. it was such an ingrained part of himself now that leander knew he’d never be able to stop thinking things were better than they were.

maybe it would be the end of him one day. but at least he’d be himself, at the end.

#potterintro #( ⊱ ━━ 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒏𝒆𝒆𝒅 𝒔𝒐𝒎𝒆 𝒔𝒑𝒂𝒄𝒆 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒕𝒊𝒎𝒆 ┊ intro. )#yes all his character parallels are directly from charactour #or that statistical character quiz #yes the sheer range of his results killed me #yes brittany was his number one match YES i'm still not over how funny that is

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son-of-alderaan · 6 years

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From one controversy to another, we move on to Star Wars — the 50 Shades to the Marquis de Sade of Mother!. The reboot orchestrated by Abrams has had its fair share of detractors, with keyboard warriors furious that the galaxy far, far away isn’t entirely run by middle-aged white men.

Is Gleeson aware of the controversy? “Look, that f******...” he begins, before calming himself a bit. “Having a problem with a female lead or a diverse cast? That doesn’t even cross my mind as being an issue, because if that’s a problem for you, then your opinion doesn’t matter to me. If you’ve paid the money, you’ve bought the right to an opinion. But, also, movies have to change.”

Has there been any attempt on the third Star Wars film to appease the issues a certain section of the fan base had? “Well, this is where my eagerness not to cause waves probably perks up, but I’ve not been aware of any corrective measures. It just feels like the third part of a trilogy.”

Domhnall Gleeson used to think he would be dead by the time he was 30, so the fact that he’s speaking to me at all is great. The actor is 35. Seriously, though, why did he think he would be done with this earth by now? “Argh, some stupid thing,” he says in a high-pitched voice. “Maybe I had a dream? But, past my 30th, I was, like, ‘What is going on?’” He pauses to take it all in. The bar. His glass of water. The soft lighting. Every moment precious. “It was odd,” he says quietly, seriously. “But it definitely gave me a weird drive to get things done.”

He must be exhausted. Just a glance at his CV reveals a restless actor in the rush of a career that’s busier and more varied than most. In the five years since his breakthrough lead in About Time, a temporarily diverting Richard Curtis romcom, Gleeson has been directed by Angelina Jolie, Alejandro Iñarritu and Darren Aronofsky, has starred in two Star Wars films and has coaxed the best performance out of Tom Cruise for more than a decade in the irrepressible American Made. He has the randomness of an actor desperate for any old part, except that these are big films and he is good in all of them. No wonder he is wired when we meet. He’s a man on 23 jobs at once, who has no idea which part he is playing next.

What is next, though, is The Little Stranger, Lenny Abrahamson’s classy take on Sarah Waters’s gothic novel. The book is about Dr Faraday (Gleeson), born into a low class, but obsessed with a nearby manor house and the woman who runs it, Caroline (Ruth Wilson). The rich family are selling land to build council houses; miseries are many and awkwardness is rife. Gleeson and Wilson are both terrific in largely tacit roles. And, though the film is being sold as a ghost story, it really isn’t one. Rather, it is about society and need, and how you die in the class you were born in.

Gleeson — whose first name is pronounced “Doe-nal” and who is the son of the excellent character actor Brendan, not to forget a welfare-officer mother, Mary — is erratic company. He’s friendly and funny, telling me how he spends his days (watching George Harrison documentaries) while laughing so loudly and squeakily, it sounds like a cave of bats being gassed. But there is also, always, a barrier. This is in part because he has the hair and make-up of the villainous General Hux in Star Wars, which he had been filming earlier that day. It makes him look like an oppressive sheet. But mostly the wall is there because he hates talking about his life or opinions and just seems unflaggingly professional. Exactly the sort of actor directors adore.

“He’s an utter joy to work with,” gushed JJ Abrams, who directed Gleeson’s first Star Wars, The Force Awakens, and is back for the third in the trilogy. “I love him,” said Jolie, who cast him for the Second World War survivalist epic Unbroken.

I tell him the clippings just portray him as someone who is nice. He smiles, of course. “Having an edge is not something I aspire to,” he says, unflustered. “But I’ve done roles that definitely explored parts of myself that are more than just being a nice fella. I’d rather do it that way, via work, than go out and slate people.”

So he doesn’t want to be contentious? “I would care if I hurt someone,” he says. “And I’m aware my opinions change. I don’t see the point. I’ve plenty of negativity in my life. Plenty of negative emotions. But I’d rather just go there in my work.”

I mention that I emailed Waters before meeting him to ask what she thought about his casting as Faraday, given that neither his CV nor his interviews are exactly littered with hints that he could play a frigid weirdo like the doctor she wrote.

“When I heard Domhnall had been cast as Dr Faraday, I thought, ‘OK, that’s interesting,’” Waters wrote. “In the films I’d seen him in, he plays youthful, endearing characters, and the Dr Faraday of the novel is a bit older and not madly likeable.” Gleeson nods as he hears this. At first, he had been sent the script for a different character. “I understood I wasn’t the obvious choice, because I wasn’t the obvious choice to Lenny.”

Once you have seen the film, it’s hard to think who else could have done it as well as he does — and his casting is testament to the fact that directors are finding it increasingly hard to imagine a role Gleeson can’t play. (He’d make a great Neil Kinnock.) In American Made, he is cocky and outrageous. In The Little Stranger, he is terrified and quiet. And, yes, it’s acting. Chameleon talent is the entire point. Gleeson is just better at it than most.

Faraday’s a mess, isn’t he? “He’s not well, you know?” Gleeson says with some sympathy. “He suffers from an emptiness that can never be filled, because it’s a desire to be something he cannot be, which is of a different class. There’s just so much bitterness, and lust and anger against women. All those things add up to a man unable to connect. Lenny said, ‘If you carry something explosive, you walk carefully.’ And I think Faraday has this. Part of him understands that he has this facility for violence, maybe.”

He is, I offer, a bit “incel”. Gleeson looks blank, so I fill him in. It stands for “involuntary celibate” and is the creation of a group that came to light in April in Toronto, when a man drove his car into women because he believed they owed him sex. “That’s interesting,” Gleeson says carefully. “It’s what a lot of film noir is about, wondering where a man’s place is. With Faraday, it’s more complicated, and the power thing is different, as Caroline is a woman, but she’s from a class he aspires to. I think he’s lonely. I loved him. I connected to him while we were doing it.”

Gleeson was born in 1983 and started acting in his late teens. He still lives in Dublin, like his family. His dad’s mainstream fame came late, so it wasn’t an acting family as such. He is hardly Scott Eastwood to Clint, so he had to earn his success. He was helped by the playwright Martin McDonagh, who cast him in The Lieutenant of Inishmore on Broadway at 23: a role that gave the actor a Tony nomination. Yet despite all this, Gleeson remains very, well, normal. His conversation, for instance, is about living in a messy flat, or Deliveroo, or his grandparents’ Catholicism and his fears about his lack of faith. “I don’t believe in anything afterwards,” he says. “Wish I did.”

In the absence of the comfort of religion, Gleeson listens to advice from his grandmother. “She used to say, ‘If you’re going to make some-thing, make something beautiful.’ If you try to put some good out in the world through your actions, that’s how you live on.”

Why then, I wonder, did he make Mother!, the Darren Aronofsky film that includes a dismembered baby? Gleeson played a man who fights his own brother. Did he read the whole script? “I did.” Even the baby bit? “It will be excessive and offensive to some people, but, for me, it’s not,” he says. “I thought it was an angry film about something that deserved to be angry about.” He has seen the film twice.

The first time Gleeson felt that he belonged as an actor was during his time on Anna Karenina, Joe Wright’s 2012 theatrical film version of the Tolstoy novel. Before that, during auditions or on film sets, he had felt out of place, but Wright wanted his cast to get to know each other, so planned umpteen rehearsals and bonding sessions. “Tom Stoppard was doing yoga with us. It was mad.”

Surely, though, thanks to Star Wars and working with Cruise, he is up there now? He pauses. “There is still something to be got over, and it’s less to do with the fact they’re stars. The power differential is not based on position in the industry, but hours of me watching them, as opposed to them possibly not having seen me in anything.”

That awe happened when he met Leonardo DiCaprio on The Revenant. Surely it’s happened to others meeting him, too? “A couple of people,” he says. What did they say? “They said very nice things.”

#domhnall gleeson #general hux #episode ix #the little stranger

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