It’s just surface level. It’s not real. Maybe talking about this again, approaching it from a different angle, will help me move forward with the piece.
“Problematic?” The dim lighting does nothing to hide Marius’s tense shoulders. “What do you mean by that?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Like, if you know the director of a movie did something horrible, are you still gonna watch it and love it and call it your favorite?”
“Wow,” he says, breathing out. “That’s a big question.”
“I know,” I say. “It’s something I’ve been thinking about. Like how I used to really love Tina Fey before I realized she makes weird racist jokes in almost all of her work. It’s hard, because I’m sure I could find out something bad about everyone.”
“Yeah, that is where it gets hard.” He runs a hand through his hair, glancing down at the recorder between the two of us. “It’s like Hitchcock did a lot of shitty things—”
“Yup.”
“And I don’t know.” He forces out a sigh. “I’m gonna sound like a jerk, but I don’t stop watching movies or TV shows just because some producer or some actor screws up.”
I close my eyes. Force myself to count to ten.
“Okay,” I say. “What’s your definition of bad?”
“That’s the thing,” he says. “I don’t know what my definition of bad is anymore. I used to think, like, if someone got drunk and said something stupid, I wouldn’t hold it against them. Or, like, if someone called something gay in 2003, I wouldn’t boycott their work.”
“But not everything is like that,” I say, leaning forward. “Like, there are murderers or whatever—”
“Murderers?”
“I’m pretty sure this record producer from the eighties killed someone,” I say, waving a hand. “But if there’s a director who has, like, raped people or abused their wives, can you still watch their stuff?”
He pauses. Swallows. I would’ve felt bad for pressing him so hard before, but not now. I need to know this.
“I don’t think so,” he says finally. “That wouldn’t— I don’t think I could.”
“Yeah.” I stare at my hot cocoa. I’ve barely touched it. “I think that’s a basic human response. But there are lots of people who hear about these things and act like nothing happened.”
“I guess people might just feel so far removed from this stuff, you know?” He’s doing what he did when we first met: talking with his hands. “Actors and directors and singers and just—I don’t know—anyone you see in the news, it’s like you don’t really know them. So if you hear an allegation, you don’t know whether or not it’s true, and it’s in a different universe, so it doesn’t feel real. Does that make sense?”
“I guess,” I say. “But there are people who stand up for those men when they hear an allegation, even if they don’t know the truth. I just don’t understand—like, when women get raped, a lot of people call them liars. And I don’t know why someone’s first response would be to assume a woman is lying about something like that.”
“It’s easier, I think.” He stares into his mug. “It’s easier to think someone is lying than to think about something so horrible happening.”
“Yeah.”
“Or,” he says, “they just don’t care.”
It seems like too simple an explanation, but it still adds up. At school, a lot of kids pick maybe three things to care about—prom, sports, and maybe student council or yearbook—and they blow off everything else. I guess it’s not wrong to focus on what’s important to you, but I feel like I care about everything. It seems like Marius does, too, so much that it bleeds out into his expressions. So why doesn’t he care about this?
Asking these questions was a chance to retrace my steps, but his answers aren’t helping. There’s no magic quote to pull the story together. It feels like I’m missing something. With a sigh, I glance down at my notebook.
“I have another question,” I say, pulling my mug toward me. “Completely different. Can you just get into character right away, or does it take you a while? I was reading about how some actors stay in character during the entire shoot.”
“Oh.” His whole demeanor perks up, tension fading from his shoulders. “It’s sort of both for me. There’s a general mood for the day, usually. I wanted to take time to get into the headspace for each scene, so sometimes I’d isolate myself. But I wasn’t in character all of the time. It’d be cool to explore that, though, maybe on another movie.”
“That’s interesting,” I say. “So you need time to prepare before you can immerse yourself in a character? Like, if I just gave you a scene right now, would you be able to do it?”
“Well, yeah, that’s kind of what auditions are,” he says. “You practice as much as possible, but you become much closer to the character when you’re actually cast.”
“What are auditions like?”
“I’m pretty close to the character and the scene, because I’ve probably been reading it over and over again,” he says, gesturing with his left hand. I scoot his mug back so he doesn’t knock it over. “But there’s a deeper kind of immersion that happens once you’ve spent some time in the role. I don’t know if that makes sense.”
“No, it does, it does,” I say. I like hearing him speak, especially about things like this. “I’ve never really thought about this sort of thing. I just pictured people walking onto the set and acting or, like, snapping out of it as soon as the director yells ‘Cut.’ ”
“Sometimes,” he says, tilting his head to the side. The silver hoop in his nose catches the light. “In high school, I had this one teacher who made us memorize
