Page 68 of Hollywood, Ending

“Kai, I would never.”

“You really want the movie to succeed.”

“I do,” she confesses. “I do. But no. I would never, ever do that shit. As much as I care about the movie, I care a hell of a lot more about you.”

“Will you be there tomorrow?” I ask her. “At the interview?”

“Of course,” she says through new tears. “Of course, Kai.”

_____

The piece comes out online the same day as the interview:

Kai Laramie sits with his costar and dear friend Juniper Castillo in a standard hotel chair in a standard, if luxurious, hotel conference room. Despite professional makeup and hair, his eyes are red and he looks like he has been crying. I ask him how he’s feeling and he says, “In our business, you have to give up some privacy, but the truth is my abuse is deeply private to me, and I’m sorry that it has been publicized so widely and that as a result, other people were hurt. It’s true that my classmate was the one who revealed the abuse to administrators at our school, and I’m very grateful that he did. He saved a lot of people. That I didn’t have the courage to say anything is an enduring regret for me.”

These words sound rehearsed, like he spent all night thinking of them, but then they also sound earnest. A full profile of Laramie is forthcoming in the magazine, but for now, suffice it to say that Laramie is the type of young person who doesn’t seem to know his own innocence, the type you want to protect with a measure of maternal attention. I ask Laramie if he regrets his burgeoning celebrity, and he says, “I don’t know if regret is the right word. I love acting. I love making stuff with other artists.”

When I first interviewed Laramie, we discussed everything from Andy Warhol (the artist at the center of his buzzy new biopic, Andy Warhol Never Gets Old) to his childhood in Indianapolis. But now, in our second meeting, there is only one topic: the trending conversation about Laramie’s abuse, and his failure to correct the initial reporting that he was the “hero” who turned his abuser in to authorities.

“I didn’t want to correct the record because I didn’t want to acknowledge the record,” he says. (Indeed, at Laramie’s publicist’s insistence, I agreed not to ask him about the abuse in our first meeting.) “I should’ve said yes, I was abused, but no, I wasn’t a hero except insofar as all who survive abuse do so heroically. I’m sorry I didn’t do that.”

Laramie is also quick to defend his costar, with whom he has confessed to being “sometimes” in love. “I trust Juniper absolutely and she has no involvement in this whatsoever.”

But enough about the scandal. Let’s talk about the movie, which succeeds at being what its subject Andy Warhol never was: deep. An astonishingly moving portrait of an artist at the end of his life and two young professionals at the start of theirs, Andy Warhol Never Gets Old is the kind of movie that feels at once fresh and classic. Both Laramie and Castillo have survived a lot in their young lives, and somehow this real-life trauma seems to have been carried onto the screen in a way that feels vibrant without ever verging into garish. Castillo, as she detailed in a viral Medium post, “My Mother Loved Me. She Also Abandoned Me,” experienced abuse and devastating neglect throughout her childhood. “I don’t know what it’s like to be loved by an adult who doesn’t want something from you,” she wrote, and Laramie’s sleepless eyes on the morning of this interview are a reminder that, perhaps, Laramie feels the same way.

We romanticize the lives of young and brilliant actors. We think of them as fundamentally different from us. And it’s true: Castillo and Laramie are better-looking than I will ever be, their hair just so, their smiles carefully calibrated. But these are just people, people placed into a machine that transforms personal history into media attention, that forges reality into fiction and fiction into reality.

Juniper is reading the story out loud to me as we both lie above the covers on her bed. She pauses and says, “It’s really good.”

“It’s okay,” I say. “I seem a little stupid.”

“You do not seem stupid, and she called our movie ‘at once fresh and classic.’ You come off looking mature and self-aware.”

“I just hate the idea that for the rest of my life, the first thing people will know about me is that I didn’t turn in my abuser.”

“You couldn’t turn your abuser in, Kai. If you could’ve, you would’ve.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I remember when the cops showed up at school and had a warrant to search his office and everything, I remember thinking, It’s over. But actually it was only beginning. It was the beginning of my parents and brother knowing. The beginning of people at school knowing. Other teachers knowing. The beginning of knowing I was gonna have to testify, and everything else.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Thanks for staying up with me, by the way. I’m sorry I freaked out. It doesn’t matter if they cancel Andromeda. I know that. I just panicked. I shouldn’t have made it about me.”

“It’s okay,” I tell her, because it is. She can hear her mom’s voice the way I can hear his voice, only he wasn’t my parent. I ask her to keep reading and she does. I love listening to Juniper read. I’ve never been able to read out loud with any confidence or fluidity; Juniper reads like a professional narrator, with perfect enunciation and absolute surety. No word surprises her or trips her up. What must it be like, I wonder, to have that relationship with language, where everything flows, where it’s no work to decode letters into sounds, and sounds into concepts.

But, of course, it’s partly the difference between us that makes it so easy to love her.

8

The next morning is our last day of press in the US. The review embargo breaks that morning, and we’re one hundred percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes until some guy from Slate says that Matthew’s “hammy, mouth-breathing incarnation of Warhol distracts from what might have otherwise been a pleasant little love story.” Still, the reviews are overwhelmingly positive. The New York Times says, “Is it Oscar bait? Sure, but this reviewer is hooked.” Variety calls it, “A lovely, heartrending movie featuring two young actors whose chemistry leaps off the screen.” All day long between interviews, Juniper and I are quoting reviews back and forth to each other.

I can’t compare it to any other feeling I’ve known—the world likes our movie, and the love and work we poured into it feel justified. A long time ago, when I lived in the same body but was a different person, my high school yearbook called me “Most Likely to Make It in Hollywood,” and now I feel like I have made it, like my life is changing in ways I cannot quite understand.

Bob calls me during an interview and I call him back between set-ups. “Should’ve waited for these goddamned reviews before we signed your Gods of Artessa deal,” he says.

“Andromeda,” Zoe interrupts.

“Right, whatever. These reviews, kid. You’re a fucking star. You’re going to get me invited to the fucking Oscars. Do I even have a tux, Zoe?”

“That’s more a question for your wife,” she says.