Page 6 of Marisol Acts the Part
Not for the first time, I curse my weakness for caffeine.
“Fill this out, please,” a harried casting assistant says as he hands me a clipboard that I almost drop thanks to my shaking hands.
If I actually had the ability to drive past a Starbucks drive-through without getting myself a little treat, I wouldn’t be sitting here, panic through the roof with a desperate need to pee at what is possibly the most important audition of my career.
It’s bad enough that I had to drive two hours out of the city to this sketchy warehouse because Rune insists on keeping things under wraps.
I’d made the foolish decision to wait until I got to the audition to use the bathroom only to find out they don’t have one.
What kind of monster holds auditions in a bathroom-less abandoned pencil factory?
I did not cut the tags off this Dior skirt to risk peeing myself the first time I wear it.
To get my mind off thoughts of completely bombing this audition and getting permanently blacklisted from Hollywood, I quickly scan the list of questions on the clipboard.
Approximately how long are you able to go without food?
Have you ever experienced lucid dreaming?
On a scale of 1–10, how comfortable are you with liminal spaces?
Would you feel comfortable being locked in an enclosed space for up to ten minutes?
If you spotted a dangerous creature in the woods, would you stand your ground or run? Explain your choice.
“Uh—”
“Just approximate,” the casting assistant replies as if I’d asked a question aloud. He disappears back into the room off the hall before I can get another word out, locking the door behind him.
Well. This is definitely the most interesting audition I’ve ever been to.
I should’ve seen this coming when the initial self-tape asked that I “emulate an animal that speaks to me.” It took almost three hours of shooting and four scrapped animals before I finally settled on a take where I genuinely felt like a cow.
Delia had praised my performance when I sent her the final clip, but it’s impossible to tell if my moos were any good.
Bruiser started to growl at me during the last few takes, so I must’ve been somewhat convincing, at least.
And lo and behold, it got me here. To what is gearing up to be the weirdest experience of my life.
Filling out the questionnaire at least gives me something to concentrate on.
I fudge my answers a bit. Tight spaces have always made me feel uneasy, but there’s no way I drove all the way out to this creepy warehouse only to have my claustrophobia get me written off before I can even get into the audition room.
I’m so focused on rating my comfort level with liminal spaces that I don’t notice another person sitting across from me until the casting assistant reappears, handing her a clipboard and the same terse “just approximate” instruction before leaving again.
Carefully, I peek at the girl with bouncy curls on the other end of the room.
I’m instantly relieved that I saw the light and booked a keratin treatment last week.
A gift to my poor, neglected hair after leaving it in my postbreakup messy bun for over eighteen hours.
The pin-straight curtain falling delicately over my shoulder gives me the perfect cover for scoping out the competition.
The girl doesn’t fit the typical LA actress mold.
And she clearly doesn’t know about the weather.
My nose wrinkles as I take in her black long-sleeve shirt and jeans.
It’s not a bad outfit—it actually really suits her.
But the thought of wearing long sleeves—and black, at that—makes my skin clammy.
The temperature here is higher than in the city, clocking in somewhere in the mid-eighties, according to my car’s dashboard.
Along with not having bathrooms, this warehouse doesn’t have AC either.
We’re both trapped in a torture dungeon.
Yet there’s not so much as a single bead of sweat anywhere on her.
Meanwhile, I’m here struggling not to sweat through the three layers of deodorant I applied after I parked my G-Wagon in the lot out back.
But it’s not the too-warm outfit that draws my attention.
It’s the unfairly perfect curve of her lips as she reads the questions on the sheet to herself, and the glossy shine in her thick spiral curls that would put any conditioner model to shame.
And her dark, arched brows that probably never need to be shaded in, and the soft, natural glow of her warm brown skin.
She’s so pretty that looking at her makes my heart pound like I just ran a marathon.
“Marisol?” the casting assistant calls out from the doorway.
I pry my eyes away from the girl, cheeks flushed from the suddenly too-hot room and the fear of almost getting caught acting like a total creep.
I fan myself with the clipboard and follow the casting assistant, making sure to keep my gaze fully averted from Ridiculously Beautiful Girl.
Now is really not the time to get hit by bisexual panic.
The door closes behind me with a menacing thunk, the casting assistant sliding behind me to lock it before ushering me down a dimly lit hallway.
The sketchy vibes are through the roof. If I wasn’t already sharing my phone location with my mom, Delia, and Lily and Posie, I would’ve immediately turned back around and gotten the hell out of here.
At least if something suspicious goes down, my people will know where to find my body.
We step into a room painted a blinding shade of white with nothing inside it except for a camera on a tripod, a black foldout table, three chairs, and two vaguely familiar faces.
“Hi, Marisol,” Marie Williams, the casting director, says with a warm smile. I’ve read for her a couple of times over the years, and even if I’ve never landed any of the roles she’s called me back for, seeing someone I know and (kind of) trust eases my nerves.
Beside her, hunched and scribbling furiously in a notebook, is who I can only assume is the infamous Rune.
There aren’t many photos of him online, but from what little I found, he seems to fit the bill.
Hair so blonde it’s almost white with pale skin to match.
His blue cotton sweater is mussed, wrinkled as though it’s never seen an iron.
Various splotches stain his black skinny jeans.
Suddenly, I feel overdressed in my pink leather miniskirt, matching ankle boots, and white silk blouse. I’ll admit the pussy bow on my top might be a bit much, but if I want to take myself more seriously, I’ve got to dress the part.
Clearly, Rune doesn’t feel the same way.
When he finally picks his head up, the intensity of his gaze nearly knocks the wind out of me. There’s a strange, wild look to his eyes—like he’s a starving predator on the hunt, and I’m his latest meal, served up on a silver platter.
“H-hi,” I manage to choke out, pulling my attention away from Rune’s piercing blue eyes and focusing on Marie instead.
The casting assistant bustles around me, muttering to himself as he fiddles with the camera.
I readjust the pink bow fastened at the crown of my head, searching for something to keep my hands busy.
While Rune whispers to Marie, mouth covered by his hand, I quickly glance down at the notebook he was writing in earlier.
Coffee stains litter the worn pages of the Moleskine.
Notes and drawings cover every inch of it, going beyond the laid-out margins and across the binding between the pages.
Some of it has even made its way off the page, pen marks littering the slips of paper beneath his notebook.
“Stand here,” the casting assistant says, not waiting for me to respond before physically moving me himself onto a black duct-taped mark in front of the camera.
I swallow hard and toy with my nameplate necklace while he adjusts the camera, then returns to the foldout table beside Marie and Rune.
“How are you?” Marie asks, her expression sympathetic when I jump at the sound of her voice.
“Good. Great,” I reply with my best attempt at a smile.
The sweat pooling beneath my arms and across my face is getting harder to ignore.
Obviously, my makeup will stay in place, but knowing my eyeliner will stay as flawless as ever doesn’t do anything to soothe the anxiety coursing through me like the venti extra dirty chai latte I downed on the way here.
In retrospect, five shots of espresso was definitely a bad call.
But in my defense, I barely got any sleep last night.
Ever since Delia emailed me about this audition, I’ve been plagued by nightmares about forgetting my lines and completely blanking in front of Rune.
I’m no stranger to auditions, and normally I’m able to calm my nerves with a morning run, but this has higher stakes than any of my other ones. Even the Legally Blonde reboot.
All the fears that have been piling up for months—that I’m being written off because of Avalon Grove, that no one wants to take a chance on me because they don’t think of me as anything more than a “teen starlet”—bubble to the surface.
Then there’s the breakup. The growing mountain of ghosted auditions and callbacks.
The lack of any calls to my agent except for brand deals and the occasional commercial.
If I didn’t have the right image for a Netflix rom-com, then how the hell am I going to fit the bill for a gritty prestige drama series?