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There was a framed photograph of my mother on the bookshelf, taken a few months before her car accident. Her hair was blonde, like mine, only longer. She had the same oval-shaped face and blue eyes, but they were lined with the beginnings of crow’s feet, and she had wispy bangs that covered her forehead. She looked beautiful and happy, smiling at the camera like she was in the middle of saying, “I love you”.
It was my eighth birthday party, and I could still replay that day in my head as though it was a movie. We’d blown up multicolored balloons, sent out party invitations by email, and I wore my favorite pink dress. Mom was the photographer that day, and I remembered her stepping around us kids in a half-circle, watching us through the camera lens as I blew out the candles on my cake, a three-layered sponge with thick cream and eight candles arranged in a circle.
I’d been distracted by my friend Katie, who had icing on her nose and hadn’t noticed dad taking the camera. But he must have at some point because there were only two people in the world that Mom looked at like that: dad and me.
What if Mom had been given an opportunity like this? It would mean so much to me if I could see her laugh one more time.
Wouldn’t I like to create something like this for my own future children?
I sighed as I picked up the photo and rubbed the dust from the frame.
“What do you think Mom would want me to do?”
Dad’s eyes became more hooded as he looked at the photo. He sank back into the couch and gave me the answer I was dreading.
“Whatever makes you happy, Kyles.”
12
WYATT
“Cut!” Preston called, and I let my body relax. My character, Edwin, was a tightly wound man and to get into character, I tensed the muscles in my shoulders and neck. Releasing them at the end of each take felt almost as satisfying as sex.
Not everyone was as relieved as me, though. The new girl looked terrified as Preston marched over and demanded, “What was that?”
Kyla was struggling and, unlike Preston, who seemed to be getting some sort of sick pleasure out of humiliating her, I didn’t like to see her being treated like that. Especially when she’d done nothing wrong — she’d said her lines in a higher pitch than Brooke would, inflecting the sentence endings differently.
“It was a creative decision,” I said. “Just let it go.”
Preston scowled and probably would have ripped me to shreds too, if I weren’t attached to the famous Cole surname. Instead, he returned to his chair and crossed one leg over the other.
“Action.”
The script called for my character to slip on a puddle of water on the floor, and I watched Kyla deliver her lines while I waited for my cue.
“You’re such a killjoy,” she said to Dean’s character. Brooke had played Daisy as an American, but Kyla spoke with her natural Australian accent. She’d tried to speak with an American accent a few times, but Preston shut her down.
“Don’t even try,” he’d said. “Nobody expects you to be good at this.”
It was another insult that earned a clap back from both myself and Isaac.
“She’s doing very well, given her level of experience,” Isaac said.
“Yeah, man,” I added, “you’re not being fair.”
I knew what it felt like to be underestimated. As the son of two famous comedians, it happened to me my whole life, starting from when I attended the Academy Awards as a toddler in green corduroy overalls.
I know.Green corduroy. What was my mom thinking? Those awards started a trend among paparazzi for capturing photos of me doing normal kid things, like shoving my finger up my nose, and selling them to whichever glossy magazine paid the most money. Those rags were struggling to stay relevant in a world where everything was going online, and had no problem with exploiting a child if it meant getting readers. But they went under anyway, and no matter how old I became, everyone in the industry still saw me as that child.
It didn’t matter that I’d been to all the best drama schools. Hell, I’d done almost as many of Shakespeare’s plays as Isaac. But despite that, the only on-camera acting job I could find was a D-grade sketch comedy show. I excelled there, but found myself in the same pigeonhole as my parents. Nobody wanted to hire me for serious roles, the ones where I could really sink myteeth into a character and become someone else. They were the parts I craved, not the frivolous comic relief parts my agent kept sending my way.
“What about the script I sent you forPushing Daisy?” my agent asked a few weeks ago. “Yes, it’s a comedy, but before you say no, Dean Hart, Isaac Williams, and Brooke Hayes are already attached.”
They were big names. I didn’t know any of them well — they probably underestimated me as much as the rest of Hollywood — but having my name attached to their project would expose me to a whole new audience.
“Maybe,” I said. “If it’s not too juvenile.”
Now here I was, playing exactly the kind of role I swore I’d never take again. The movie was the kind of road trip rom-com that would perform well in theaters for a few weeks, then hopefully find a larger audience on streaming platforms. And my role in it was to play the comic relief — again — in a slapstick capacity where I’d repeatedly hurt myself in different ways.
