Meetings and....Greetings?
The days passed in a whirlwind of deadlines and meetings, each one bringing you closer to the inevitable confrontation with Tom. Despite your best efforts to push aside your feelings of hurt and betrayal, they continued to linger beneath the surface. A constant reminder of your past.
As you sat at your desk, typing away on your computer, the familiar ding of an email notification pops up on your screen. It's from Audrey, with the subject line "Meeting with Tom".
Your heart skips a beat as you open the email, your hands trembling slightly. Audrey had scheduled a meeting between you and Tom to discuss the details of the exposé. You knew this day would come, but you never imagined it would be so soon.
Taking a deep breath, you gather your thoughts and make your way to the meeting room. The air feels heavy with anticipation as you step inside, your eyes immediately drawn to Tom sitting at the far end of the table.
As your gaze meets his, a wave of resentment washes over you, your memories of the past flooding back with painful clarity. You can feel the weight of his accusing gaze on you, his eyes boring into your own soul with a mixture of anger, hurt, and disgust.
For a moment, neither of you says anything, the tension in the room thick enough to cut with a knife. You can see the conflict reflected in Tom's eyes, his jaw clenched tight as he struggles to maintain his composure.
Audrey clears her throat, breaking the silence and drawing your attention away from Tom. "Ella, Tom, thank you both for coming on such short notice," she says, her voice cheerful but tinged with a hint of tension. "Let's get started, shall we?"
As Audrey begins to outline the details of the exposé, you and Tom exchange polite nods, but the tension between you is palpable. As the discussion progresses, you find yourselves disagreeing on several key points, your voices growing more strained with each passing moment.
"I think the main focus should be on Tom's career trajectory," you say, your tone firm. "His rise to fame, the challenges he's faced along the way, the whole shebang."
Tom shakes his head, his expression stubborn. "I completely disagree. Every single celebrity has to face many of the same challenges. I want to promote how fame impacts the individual. How it affects relationships, my sense of self. That it's not all it's thought to be."
You bristle at his words, feeling a surge of anger rising within you. "That's not anywhere near what we discussed or agreed upon," you snap, your voice sharp. "We discussed that we would tell your story; the average British man to Marvel star. We never agreed to air your dirty laundry."
Tom's jaw tightens, his eyes flashing with irritation. "My personal life is a part of my story, whether you like it or not. I'm not here to share a story that the average gossip-starting journalist could offer. "
As the discussion drags on, the atmosphere in the room grows increasingly hostile. You and Tom trade barbs and accusations, each one more cutting than the last. Despite your best efforts to remain professional, it's clear that the wounds of the past are still raw and unhealed.
Finally, after what feels like an eternity, Audrey interrupts the heated exchanged. "Alright, that's enough," she says, her voice firm. "Clearly, we're not going to reach a resolution today. Let's reconvene tomorrow and try to find some common ground."
You and Tom exchange tense nods, a silent acknowledgement of the unresolved tension that still lingered between you both. As you leave the meeting room, you can't help but feel a sense of exhaustion wash over you. Despite your best efforts to move forward, you knew that the road ahead would be filled with obstacles. The main obstacle being the one and only Thomas William Hiddleston.
--
A/N I've finally updated, woop woop 💃
Very sorry for not updating, I've just been extremely lazy.
Anyways, more updates to come hopefully 🥰
🏷️ @km-ffluv @huntress-artemiss @goddessofchaoss @asgards-princess-of-mischief lemme know if you want to be added or removed :)
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...“...we were already talking about ‘Essex Serpent’ and it’s so brilliant, and you’re so incredible in it. I kind of want to know about that first meeting with Claire Danes...”
“Well she’s playing Cora Seaborne....she’s a widow on the other side of grieving the loss of her first husband...she’s out on the Essex coast...she’s digging around for fossils...and she runs into this very faithful and God-fearing community, and I play the pastor, the reverend - somehow. Erm, and - but they have this very unusual meeting where they don’t recognise each other...”
“...the landscape...it’s so beautiful and atmospheric...and it’s Clio Barnard, who’s incredible.”
“Yes.”
“What was it that drew you to that role...?”
“You know, I think was partly Clio...I met her years ago...we both had films at the London Film Festival in 2008 maybe, 2009...I’d seen her film and I really liked her and we had a really interesting conversation...I read this and it seemed so interesting. It was dealing with themes thought were really resonant; dealing with uncertainty and anxiety; what happens to collective anxiety as it can, it can start to sort of distort reality in your imagination, if you don’t have all the answers - it rushes into fill the void. And the war at the time between science and faith as a way of trying to explain life, and find meaning in it. And it seemed very romantic in a way, in quite an old-fashioned way, and yet really earthbound and really of the land.”
“...obviously, it’s very different from “Loki.” Is that a purposeful choice you made?”
“It couldn’t be more different. I mean it was. I read it towards the end of making “Loki.” We had like a week left, and, and there was a, the Thanksgiving weekend. Everybody went home and, we had a week left, and I read it that weekend. And I found the argument really interesting. This, this thing of how do we find meaning in our lives? Like, what do we put at the centre of, of how we find meaning - and these characters are all struggling because it’s a time of enormous change. Because yes, the age of reason is coming, and the world organised around religion, that’s going to diminish. The idea of a mythical beast that’s hiding in, submerged in the water, I mean you kind of - it’s very psychological. So it’s kind of about the unknown; The Essex Serpent is the unknown, and we fear what we don’t understand. And so every character has something I think that maybe psychologically is unknown, and they’re trying to get to grips with that through the course of the story. I loved making it. And we were out on the marshes in Essex.”
“It’s like, so brutal.”
“And it was nice to be outside.”
“So beautiful. I think I find it so - when you are somewhere real and you are out there in the real landscape, even if you are freezing cold...”
“You put up with it, you know? You kind of like - yeah, the skies out there, that’s where like I realised all these painters had gone out there and there’s something about the east facing sunsets - and the skies are extraordinary. So if you happen to catch yourself, you’re doing a scene outside and suddenly it gets to about 4.30 - 5 o’clock and the sky just does something, you think: ‘Ah, this is why we came to Essex.’”
“Did you know Claire before...?”
“I didn’t yeah, and we had a really, really good time. We had it during the third - I’m trying to get this right - the third lockdown. We were in our little bubble, as, you know, everyone’s been in a bubble,”
“...when you’re filming...you sort of end up bubbling.”
“You just get in the bubble, yeah. It was so muddy; I think one of our location scouts ending up losing, losing his wellies.”
“His legs.” (they laugh)
“Losing his legs. Just never got out of the mud, yeah, yeah. It was so, I mean it it sounds, it was, it was so muddy - it was almost comical how muddy it was sometimes. From the Essex marshes to sunny, southern California. How was Pam & Tommy? How did it come into your life?”
“It was really random...my impulse to do it was really immediate. I don’t know how you are about knowing what’s the right thing to do or not to do?”
“Sometimes it just - you just know, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You just go: (clicks fingers) ‘That really appeals.’”
“...I find that the hardest thing is like knowing when to plunge and take the lead.”
“Yeah.”
“...I really cared about, you know, what the issues and the bigger picture of what we were exploring.”
“Of course, yeah, yeah.”
“About privacy, and the violation of the media...”
“Yeah.”
“...amazing people involved like Craig Gillespie -”
“Yeah.”
“And Sebastian Stan who plays Tommy Lee and -”
“When the project came to you, it was gonna be Craig Gillespie, and it was gonna be Sebastian Stan, it was all a collected -”
“...I really don’t know...one of the writers said that the reason they thought of me was because it was playing Pamela Anderson much earlier. I mean she grew up in a very small town in Canada -”
“Yeah.”
“...I related to a sort of - a sense of the newness of this whole thing.”
“Yeah.”
“And then how quickly things can change...”
“Your work was extraordinary.”
“Oh, thanks Tom.”
“I mean just, unrecognisable in it. Certainly in comparison; the, the physical transformation, the vocal transformation and the sort of, you know, taking on a, a real person is, and I know, it’s such a - it feels like an enormous responsibility.”
“Yeah, because you’ve done it too.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s terrifying, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. You want to honour and respect and -”
“Right. Be a good custodian -”
“Yeah.”
“Look the part and be respectful -”
“Yeah.”
“I felt like if I came at it with heart, and with like total sort of understanding and desire only to be honest and take care of the story...that was all I could do. I don’t know if I’d do it again anytime soon...when you played Hank Williams, right -”
“A long time ago. He died when he was 29. He’s a link in a chain, really, of music -”
“Yeah, right.”
“There’s people like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen and they’re all like: ‘We’re only doing this ‘cos Hank was doing it’ so, okay. But um -”
“...it can fuel you; that desire to do her justice...I’d never worked harder.”
“Yeah right, of course - you could tell. And I’ve thought, ‘cos the show I suppose it opens with their connectedness and their passion and their connection to each other, and there’s a really interesting idea that I think the whole show explores, and particularly through your performance, which is the complexity of what it means to be a public person and when a persona is almost created on your behalf and you don’t have any possession over it and that can then be manipulated and distorted. The scene where Pamela’s prepared - is it episode 3? - Pamela’s prepared that big speech for, to do the next day, and she’s gonna nail it, and you nail it as her nailing it, and then you turn up on set and then you turn up on set and the producers say: ‘We thought it was stronger wordless.’”
“...yeah.”
“I thought that really showed the - there’s this perceived potency that she has, but also a vulnerability, and then, and then the wrestling about coming back the next day saying: ‘I think we should.’
“...it was really bad in that time with a lot of these women...these sort of double standards...it’s still hard sometimes to go against what people assume of you, whether that even be like -”
“Yeah.”
“In work or in the press and the perception that -”
“Yeah, sure, yeah - yeah.”
“It’s hard to ignore it all sometimes -”
“Yeah.”
“And push though....”
“Yeah. Where do you begin with becoming Pamela Anderson in terms of the physical transformation? I’m sure you had amazing teams, hair, make-up, wardrobe.”
“Yeah God, the best...I actually lost like 20 pounds which is crazy...I wanted to be athletic. I wanted to be so strong -”
“Yeah.”
“As opposed to just drop like weight. And then I had these prosthetic boobs and forehead. It took four hours every day.”
“Wow.”
“And during that time, I had a montage of her interviews from the ’90s...She speaks really, really fast...I just like watched her so much and stayed in her kind of like the whole time.”
“Wow. How long was the shoot?”
“I think it was 4 months. Or 5 months.”
“Goodness.”
“And you were still doing all the training, while you’re filming?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Wow.”
“...I didn’t speak English for the entire five months, even at home.”
“Really?!” (laughs)
“.,,I just thought: ‘If I slip up once’ -”
“Yeah.”
“And now I do that awful thing where someone’s talking American and I start...”
“You start talking American.” (laughs)
“It’s so -”
“Yeah, but lots of actors do that. And it’s - it’s easier, isn’t it? It feels, it just feels almost like you’ve played an establishing chord at the beginning of the day, you just wanna stay in the chord; you don’t wanna - you don’t wanna be in some other tune, you know - or be caught out asking for, you know: ‘Can I have a sandwich?’ or something.’”
“Yeah, going to the loo, no, the bathroom, no, the restroom.”
“Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah, wow. I can relate to that.”
“Yeah.”
“So did you think that people on, on the crew, did they ever get to know Lily James?”
“I don’t think so. And nor with Sebastian Stan. We really didn’t get to know each other till we started doing press.”
“Wow.”
“...the days were so long, like 18 hours or so. I find that the Americans are worse for the long days -” (both laugh)
“Right.”
“Us more respectable.”
“You mean just going, going long -”
“Longer days...I found that so hard...but I guess that was because of the prosthetic.”
“It’s a lot for you.”
“How has that been with you to “Loki”?...It was probably long days, but getting into him?”
“Yeah, I mean Loki’s changed so much over the years for me. It’s been, he’s been like - I love playing him, it’s been a huge journey, yeah.”
“What’s that like?”
“It is - it’s amazing. I mean was cast when I was 29, and I’m 41.”
“Credit to you for having let like him emerge and grow and shift.”
“Well, and to everybody at Marvel for letting me doing it, and, and the audience actually who, who I’m sure if they stopped being interested would let me know. Initially you know, I had iterations with Loki, and the costumes were so elaborate, and I was wearing a wig and we were shooting in the summer in New Mexico and Cleveland. I was always trying to break out of the mask of, of - let something honest come through. You build the character, you build the exterior and then you have to express something through the mask in a way, I suppose that’s what hair and make-up is; it’s a mask of something.
And by the time we got to the, the series of - on Disney+ - what’s great about it was Loki’s like stripped of all - all the things that are familiar. Immediately, he’s literally stripped of his clothes and put in a jumpsuit, and then other clothes, and his status is gone and he’s nowhere near Thor, or Odin or Asgard, all these things. And I wanted to - one of my big things going in was like: ‘I’m gonna grow my hair and I’m gonna dye it. It’s just gonna as natural as it can be so I can spend all my time investigating the interiority’ you know, rather than worrying, just saying: ‘I think everyone knows who the character is now’ - and, and also let’s - let’s open him up and -”
“Go deep.”
“Go deep and find new aspects of him and challenge the character to change and grow and so it was really - I loved it, it was really fun.”
“...it’s like amazing how funny - first of all, you’re so funny -”
“Thank you.”
“And then also it’s like deeply vulnerable.”
“Yeah.”
“And so moving.”
“That’s them that’s the cocktail with him. That’s the weird -”
“So impressive.”
“It’s a writing thing, and a massive tip. It’s such an ancient character, you know; he’s the god of mischief, so like, I remember looking up in the dictionary ages ago and, and it said: ‘Inclination to playfulness’, and I was like: ‘Yay!’ (Lily cheers) As an actor, yeah, yeah, exactly, like all you gotta do is play - like, always make sure there’s a, there’s a strain of playfulness in there. The funny thing with Loki is he wants to, to let everybody know of his great high status, and there’s nothing like I mean status for comedy really. ‘Cos anyone who thinks they’re important -”
“So Ricky Gervais...The Office...”
“Yeah, exactly. It’s like: ‘You’re not important.’ So if you pump up the hubris, then humiliation can follow, and then it’s hopefully funny, but you sort of play it with a straight bat. Especially in the show, he does this thing in Avengers: Endgame; picks up the cube and disappears. He’s essentially broken the rules of reality, which is he’s done something he’s not supposed to do. So he’s arrested and apprehended by this organisation, the TVA, who like, exist out of time, and they make sure that reality unfolds according to predetermined -”
“So everything’s predestined.”
“And Loki’s the God of chaos so he’s like - it’s order versus chaos, and immediately he’s just constantly being humbled and brought down to size, and so there’s this richness for kind of, for everything in there; for drama, for comedy, for vulnerability, so it’s a - a great conceit.”
“Even more enjoyable maybe from doing the movies or all sort of -”
“Different.”
“Longer.”
“Longer, yeah.”
“I like doing a TV show because you get so much longer to be in the character and to like, let everything unfold.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah - more time.”
“The first director with Loki was with Ken Brannagh -”
“Yes, we share this. Yes, yeah, yeah. We kind of share like this life-changing moment.”
“Yeah.”
“We both received a phone call from Kenneth Brannagh, and it’s changed everything.”
“Yeah. And I wondered how much he was a part of...when I did Cinderella with him, there was a huge journey of collaboration...”
“He’s amazing like that, yes. It’s such a testament to his generosity as a director as well. That he just understands actors and understands that if you can find connection points that are, that are internal, that may never be known about, everything you do will have a ring of authentic truth to it. Um, and so yeah, before the first film back in 2009, Chris Hemsworth and, and Anthony Hopkins, and Rene Russo and I would sit around a table and sort of delineate this little family drama and talk about, you know, Thor and Loki’s childhood and all these things that became baked into the relationships - maybe weren’t expressed in the story - but you could feel between us all as actors, which is really, you know; that’s a, that’s a real director.”
“Yeah, I was reading about this, which is so exciting, which is that Loki is the first queer Marvel character in the, is it MCU?”
“MCU. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Marvel Cinematic Universe. Yeah, I, I can’t - I can’t believe that’s; I’m amazed if that’s true. Um, it may be that, it may be that in the, in the - in the films, in the film stories it might be true. You know, back from my early days of researching the character in the ancient myths, the identity of Loki was fluid in every aspect. In gender, in sexuality. It’s something - a very ancient part of the character. I thought about it; it hadn’t emerged in the stories we’ve told um, and I was really pleased and privileged actually that it came up in, in the series It’s a small step; it’s not, you know, it’s not as as far - there’s so much more to do. You know, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has to reflect the world we live in. It was an honour to, to, to bring that up; it was really important to me, it was really important to Kate Herron and Michael Waldron, and I’m pleased that we could bring it into our story.”
“Yeah, and how incredible. What an impact that can make...”
“Yes, yeah, yeah - yeah.”
“And for people to feel represented -”
“Absolutely.”
“And to see themselves.”
“Yes.”
It’s just so important.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
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