ragandboneshopoftheheart (![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small} ragandboneshopoftheheart) wrote,@ 2011-07-18 02:31 am UTC |
These are two chunks of dialogue that I wrote out and didn't use.
Jesse's panic-attack-triggering conversation with his publicist
This first one was not so much cut as never intended to be read; it's the full version of the phone conversation Jesse has with his publicist in part 7. I wrote this out in full so that Jesse's side of the conversation would make sense.
-Hi, why are you...
-Are you saying you don't want to hear from me, Jesse, because so help me --
-What? No, I'm sorry, it's just early, and it's Sunday, so I...
-I'm going to level with you, Jesse. You've run your mouth off without clearing it with me, and I'm kind of pissed.
-What? But --
-That interview you did for French television leaked.
-How is that even possible, it hasn't been...
-I don't know! Somebody in the studio, some summer intern looking to make a quick buck --
-I don't -- I don't really...
- -- and of course they've cut out everything except the one thing I always, always told you you had to clear with me first! Damn it, Jesse, I know you hate publicity, but that's no reason to pull a stunt --
-I -- please, slow down, I don't understand...
- -- like this, it's all over Twitter, do you hear me?
-On -- on Twitter, what is Twitter?
-The internet, Jesse! The whole internet is saying you told French television you're gay!
-...wait, what?
-You heard!
-...I didn't say that...
-Don't play games with me, Jesse!
-No, no, how could you...
-Are you going to tell me this is a hoax? Because that's not going to fly.
-I'm not fucking stupid, okay? I wouldn't...
-Oh, you wouldn't, huh?
-No, not without talking to you...
-So you're telling me you didn't say that?
-It, it has to be a translation error...
-If it was, I wouldn't be yelling at you.
-Wh-what? That...
-I've got audio of it right here. You want to hear it?
-Oh, God...
-I've got a transcript. You want me to read it to you? No, no, of course you don't. But, look, here's the gist: you said it wasn't hard to play a guy in love with Andrew, because you really were in love with him. Did you mean that?
-I don't really remember...
[pause]
-You don't remember?
-Yes. No. I, I don't know!
-You don't know? How can you not know?
-I, I, I was -- I was tired, I was -- kind of spaced out, I...
-I can tell! You look so pale and sweaty and out of it in the clips that people are saying you're on smack, which I know is ridiculous but try telling that to Gawker. But did you say that, Jesse? Does it sound like something you might have said?
-Yes -- no. I, I don't know!
-Damn it, Jesse, you can't -- [sigh] Look, you said it, all right? So how are we going to spin this?
-...What?
-Do you want to come out? Is that what this is about? Because you can do that, I don't see it as a problem for you given your profile, but you need to let me know so we can control the narrative.
-...I...
-Just tell me, Jesse. It's a yes or no question. Do you want to come out?
-...yes, okay, yes, but that doesn't mean...
-Okay, we'll do that. But not now. This has to be under our control, okay?
-Y-yes. I understand...
-And this is going to be weird, considering... I'm going to have to talk to the publicity people for Giovanni's Room, because they're going to want to know.
-Yes, please. Please do that, I -- I'm so sorry, I...
-No, I'm sorry, I kind of blew up at you there. It's early in the morning here, and... Look, just... I've got to put some fires out, but this'll be fine. Just... keep a lid on this until we've got a strategy in place, okay?
-Yes. Yes, I will. Thank you.
The interview with Attitude magazine
I never actually finished this. This was the original form the epilogue took -- it didn't feel right even as I was writing it, and at a certain point I said to myself "this is silly, it's just rehashing the events of the fic, which all the readers have already seen". So I stopped, and wrote the actual epilogue, in which new stuff happens, and which was a huge improvement over this as an epilogue. Some elements of this can be seen in the final epilogue (albeit slightly changed).
I include this partly out of a sense of completism, and partly because it offers a sense of outside perspective which is potentially interesting. And it fills in some more details of exactly what Jesse's disastrous interview was like.
(The intro is written in my attempt at a pastiche of the Attitude house style, which is flippant, chatty, and very much assumes that both writer and reader are gay British men.)
Life imitating art?
by Matt Jones
When the news first broke that acclaimed director Joe Wright of Atonement fame was planning to make a film version of classic gay novel Giovanni's Room, gays the world over were set a-twitter with anticipation -- and dread. After all, Giovanni's Room is yet another tragic romance, and it's set in the 1950s, so it could easily have ended up as a Brokeback-alike that would leave the gay audience cold while raking in the cash from straight cinemagoers who like their gays best when they're heartbroken or dead. Here at Attitude Towers, we expressed cautious optimism on learning that Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield, of Social Network fame, had been cast in the leads -- if nothing else, we'd have something nice to look at while we wept silently into our hankies. And the confirmation that Sir Ian McKellen (our living patron saint) was to play the role of Jacques made us feel positively obliged to trot along on premiere night. But it's the off-camera story that's captured our imaginations, and guaranteed that Giovanni's Room will go down in gay cinema history. And it hasn't even been released yet...
From pre-production on, the film was dogged by rumours: the producers had skimped on the budget because they thought a gay movie was too risky; Wright could barely tolerate Garfield's acting style and didn't much like him as a person; there were time-wasting communication errors between the (mostly British) lead crew and the (mostly French) low-level grunts. Then with only a few weeks of filming left on the schedule, a bootleg copy of an interview with Eisenberg turned up on video site Dailymotion -- only to be pulled a few hours later, due to alleged copyright infringements.
An Attitude staff member saw the video, though he sadly failed to download or transcribe it before it got pulled. In it, a visibly disoriented and sweaty Eisenberg, pale under the studio lights, rambles in a somewhat incoherent fashion about the hot Paris weather, race relations in America in the 1950s, and how easy it is to play a character who's in love when you're in love with your co-star for real.
Coming from any other Oscar nominee, this would have set the tabloids on fire -- but there were complications that kept the rumour mills from grinding as fast as normal. For one thing, Eisenberg was obviously confused and in a state of ill-health, so that the one rumour that did circulate widely was that he'd developed a drug habit. For another, he had been known to give strange and mischievous answers in interviews, once to the point of prompting an interviewer to say "Are you fucking with me?" in those exact words when he was promoting the movie Zombieland.
On top of that, his epic bromance with Garfield was already the stuff of legend long before they'd started making Giovanni's Room, with neither feeling any inhibitions about declaring their love for each other to all and sundry. We'd always assumed it was strictly platonic, and when there were reports from the set that Eisenberg had collapsed from dehydration and stress and was taking time off, we chalked the interview up to exhaustion-induced hyperbole and moved on. And when, two weeks later, co-star Garfield was seen on the Stonewall float at London Pride, chatting with Sir Ian, we chalked that up to coincidence, though those of us more inclined to wishful thinking were beginning to wonder whether the "bromance" was quite as brotherly as all that.
Fortunately, we didn't have to wonder for very long. Two days after the parade, still nursing our hangovers, we got an offer of an exclusive no-holds-barred interview with Garfield once principal photography was finished on Giovanni's Room. In the event, to our delight, he brought Eisenberg with him. What follows is a nearly unedited transcript of the interview we conducted with the pair. Trust us, it answers every question you have about them -- and probably some you didn't think of...
A: So, Jesse, I see you've had your hair done.
JE: Yeah, they had to do that for the movie. David, the character I play, is pretty much a classic WASP, you know, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, so the Jewfro look had to go. It's not very 1950s.
AG: I miss the curls.
JE: You know, I actually don't? I don't like the bleach because it looks weird, but this short cut is kind of -- I like the way it feels. It's sort of light. Especially in the hot weather.
AG: It is kind of summery. And I can see your forehead! Usually your forehead is hiding under your hair.
JE: There's nothing special about my forehead.
AG: I beg to differ.
A: So you play David, and Andrew, you play Giovanni.
AG: That's right.
A: Given that you've been friends for a while, what was it like to play lovers?
JE: It was basically hell. From start to finish, it was incredibly stressful and difficult.
AG: Yeah, it was -- do you want to tell him or shall I?
JE: Well, you start, and then when you get something wrong I'll step in.
AG: I love how you say "when", not "if".
JE: I'm just being realistic.
AG: You see what I have to put up with? Anyway. The day before we started filming, I arrived in Paris, at the apartment -- we were sharing an apartment, a very nice little place in the Marais.
A: Isn't that the gay neighbourhood?
AG: Yes, it is! I didn't know that at the time, but it is. And, anyway, we had a day out. We went book-shopping and we ate crepes and it was... I had this moment, when we got back, when I was suddenly blindsided with the revelation: I love this man, I am in love with him. And it's like, fuck! That's not good! I mean, it's wonderful, but it's also terrible, because firstly when you're friends, it's just... it's like, you've got something to lose. And you don't want to lose it. You don't want to fuck it up. And then, we were going to be making this film and it was going to be so hard. It was going to be hard anyway, but what if I'd said something and Jesse had been "well, thanks, but no thanks"? We'd still have to go through the motions, and that would have been really awkward.
A: When you say "go through the motions", you mean things like kissing?
AG: And sex scenes. Which are -- obviously it's not a porn film so we're not actually having sex, but there's some things you can't fake. And I felt like: this is absolutely the worst possible time for this to happen, for me to figure this out.
JE: It's good that you didn't tell me then, because I would have really freaked out.
AG: When did you figure it out? I'm sorry, I feel like I should have asked you this before.
JE: No, it's okay. I don't really remember a distinct moment when I went from not-knowing to knowing. Like, there were times when I was -- the thing that not a lot of people know is that the symptoms of strong sexual attraction are pretty similar to the symptoms of an incoming panic attack. So I was having these very confusing moments when I'd be hanging around with Andrew and suddenly getting a dry mouth, racing heart, shortness of breath, and thinking "crap, do I need to call my therapist, do I need to go back on the meds, what the hell". And then you kissed me that first time, and it was obvious that that wasn't it.
A: This was a screen kiss?
AG: No, no, actually -- shall I?
JE: Yeah, go ahead.
AG: Even though I'd decided I wasn't going to say anything, at least not straight away, I had this very strong feeling that I didn't want our first kiss to be in front of the cameras. So I sort of escorted Jesse to a dressing room and...
JE: And you told me to hold still.
AG: I didn't want to scare you.
JE: So... that was our first kiss. And then there was the second one, because the first one was kind of one-sided. And then I knew I wanted to be doing that for real, but I don't remember exactly when that transitioned into actually being in love, or even being aware of being in love.
A: Am I hearing this right? You two were in love with each other?
AG: Are! Present tense.
JE: And future.
AG: And future. Yeah, and that made it harder. Well, easier in some ways because there was no need to fake any of the emotion, the attachment -- but then, harder too, because when your own real feelings are involved, you have to keep them under control. And that's -- and then, we were, I was keeping myself in check all the time, when we weren't in character.
JE: So was I. All the time, I was obsessing over it -- was I showing too much, could you see what I was feeling, was I freaking you out.
AG: I had no idea.
JE: Neither did I.
A: So you're together now?
AG: Yes. Yes, we are.
JE: Since the wrap party.
AG: Yeah, that was when we finally got together.
JE: It was -- in a way, it was good, because we'd already done a lot of -- there's this awkward moment when you're kissing someone for the first time and you're not sure where to put your hands or how to angle your face. That was not a problem. We'd had plenty of practice.
A: That's got to lend an extra authenticity to the film.
AG: That's probably the only reason my agent let me do this interview.
JE: Your agent is kind of a hardass.
AG: No, she's not! She's very good at what she does. She's just... she's very firm.
JE: That sounds like a polite way of saying "hardass".
AG: It's just that, I mean, I had a chat with Ian -- Sir Ian -- he doesn't like it when you call him that to his face -- and he said "you might find yourself not getting offered roles you would have got before". And it's early days yet, so who knows? But, yeah, I'm sure people are going to be interested. I mean, I would. If there was a film, like a romantic film, where the lead actors fell in love for real -- it adds an extra layer to it.
JE: Do you think people are going to think we're faking it? For publicity?
AG: That would be hilarious.
JE: Considering how long we spent pretending to each other that there was nothing going on, there would be something sort of pleasingly ironic about it.
AG: But you know, it's -- I mean, I don't really care. And that probably sounds ridiculous since we're doing this interview to tell people all about it, but... I mean, I want to shout it from the rooftops because I feel so, for lack of a, this is going to sound really cheesy but I just feel blessed. I really do. Just knowing Jesse at all is amazing, and then to be with Jesse like this is a --
JE: Oh, stop.
AG: You love it really.
JE: You're making me blush.
AG: You're cute when you blush.
JE: That's not helping.
AG: But, anyway. I don't care what people think. I don't want to have to hide this, because it's the best thing in my life, Jesse is the best thing in my life. People can believe that or not, I don't care.
A: I think anyone who saw you together would believe it.
AG: Aw, really?
A: You're still in the honeymoon period, right?
JE: Mm. That's one way of putting it.
A: It shows.
JE: There are so many ways to interpret that.
A: Well, you're sitting really close together, for one thing...
JE: That was another thing that made it hard. I mean, when you're friends you can do a lot of casual, sort of... touching and it doesn't matter because it doesn't mean anything. Then these new feelings come along and suddenly everything means something, and it becomes really difficult to negotiate your way through a lot of things that used to be very straightforward. Like, for instance, there was that time when Andrew didn't wear a shirt at breakfast for a week.
AG: It wasn't a week! It was maybe three days. And it was really hot.
JE: Yes. Yes, it was. But that's not the point. The point is, if we're just friends, it's nothing. It's totally normal for somebody to sit around without a shirt on, if there's a heatwave. But then for me, it was like: oh, hey, Andrew's not wearing a shirt, great, now I have to wait for him to leave the room before I can stand up.
AG: Really?
JE: You have no idea.
AG: I wasn't doing it on purpose.
JE: I didn't think you were.
A: Was this around the time you did the interview for French television?
JE: Yes. Did you see it?
A: I didn't, but I heard about it from someone who did.
JE: I don't even remember it. I was completely out of it.
A: Apparently you looked very confused.
JE: At that point I hadn't eaten for about 36 hours, and like I said, there was a heatwave. So I wasn't really aware of what I was saying.
AG: And then you had a panic attack.
JE: Yeah. And that was...
AG: It was scary. I mean, it was scary for me. I can't imagine what it was like for you.
JE: But then I -- you were really nice to me, and it was actually kind of... There can be this pressure when you're dreading something, when you feel like if it happens, that's going to be the end of the world. Well, it happened. Not just the interview but the attack afterward, those were my worst-case scenarios. And the world didn't end. And then we had a really nice afternoon.
AG: I think that was when I started to think maybe you felt something for me, too.
JE: I was too exhausted to pretend I didn't.
A: So you guys didn't know, all that time. Nothing was happening during the filming?
AG: No.
JE: No. Nothing -- no more than usual.
AG: I felt like -- I mean, in hindsight it looks a bit silly. We were sort of pining for each other for, what, four months? But I really felt it was impossible.
Jesse's panic-attack-triggering conversation with his publicist
This first one was not so much cut as never intended to be read; it's the full version of the phone conversation Jesse has with his publicist in part 7. I wrote this out in full so that Jesse's side of the conversation would make sense.
-Hi, why are you...
-Are you saying you don't want to hear from me, Jesse, because so help me --
-What? No, I'm sorry, it's just early, and it's Sunday, so I...
-I'm going to level with you, Jesse. You've run your mouth off without clearing it with me, and I'm kind of pissed.
-What? But --
-That interview you did for French television leaked.
-How is that even possible, it hasn't been...
-I don't know! Somebody in the studio, some summer intern looking to make a quick buck --
-I don't -- I don't really...
- -- and of course they've cut out everything except the one thing I always, always told you you had to clear with me first! Damn it, Jesse, I know you hate publicity, but that's no reason to pull a stunt --
-I -- please, slow down, I don't understand...
- -- like this, it's all over Twitter, do you hear me?
-On -- on Twitter, what is Twitter?
-The internet, Jesse! The whole internet is saying you told French television you're gay!
-...wait, what?
-You heard!
-...I didn't say that...
-Don't play games with me, Jesse!
-No, no, how could you...
-Are you going to tell me this is a hoax? Because that's not going to fly.
-I'm not fucking stupid, okay? I wouldn't...
-Oh, you wouldn't, huh?
-No, not without talking to you...
-So you're telling me you didn't say that?
-It, it has to be a translation error...
-If it was, I wouldn't be yelling at you.
-Wh-what? That...
-I've got audio of it right here. You want to hear it?
-Oh, God...
-I've got a transcript. You want me to read it to you? No, no, of course you don't. But, look, here's the gist: you said it wasn't hard to play a guy in love with Andrew, because you really were in love with him. Did you mean that?
-I don't really remember...
[pause]
-You don't remember?
-Yes. No. I, I don't know!
-You don't know? How can you not know?
-I, I, I was -- I was tired, I was -- kind of spaced out, I...
-I can tell! You look so pale and sweaty and out of it in the clips that people are saying you're on smack, which I know is ridiculous but try telling that to Gawker. But did you say that, Jesse? Does it sound like something you might have said?
-Yes -- no. I, I don't know!
-Damn it, Jesse, you can't -- [sigh] Look, you said it, all right? So how are we going to spin this?
-...What?
-Do you want to come out? Is that what this is about? Because you can do that, I don't see it as a problem for you given your profile, but you need to let me know so we can control the narrative.
-...I...
-Just tell me, Jesse. It's a yes or no question. Do you want to come out?
-...yes, okay, yes, but that doesn't mean...
-Okay, we'll do that. But not now. This has to be under our control, okay?
-Y-yes. I understand...
-And this is going to be weird, considering... I'm going to have to talk to the publicity people for Giovanni's Room, because they're going to want to know.
-Yes, please. Please do that, I -- I'm so sorry, I...
-No, I'm sorry, I kind of blew up at you there. It's early in the morning here, and... Look, just... I've got to put some fires out, but this'll be fine. Just... keep a lid on this until we've got a strategy in place, okay?
-Yes. Yes, I will. Thank you.
The interview with Attitude magazine
I never actually finished this. This was the original form the epilogue took -- it didn't feel right even as I was writing it, and at a certain point I said to myself "this is silly, it's just rehashing the events of the fic, which all the readers have already seen". So I stopped, and wrote the actual epilogue, in which new stuff happens, and which was a huge improvement over this as an epilogue. Some elements of this can be seen in the final epilogue (albeit slightly changed).
I include this partly out of a sense of completism, and partly because it offers a sense of outside perspective which is potentially interesting. And it fills in some more details of exactly what Jesse's disastrous interview was like.
(The intro is written in my attempt at a pastiche of the Attitude house style, which is flippant, chatty, and very much assumes that both writer and reader are gay British men.)
Life imitating art?
by Matt Jones
When the news first broke that acclaimed director Joe Wright of Atonement fame was planning to make a film version of classic gay novel Giovanni's Room, gays the world over were set a-twitter with anticipation -- and dread. After all, Giovanni's Room is yet another tragic romance, and it's set in the 1950s, so it could easily have ended up as a Brokeback-alike that would leave the gay audience cold while raking in the cash from straight cinemagoers who like their gays best when they're heartbroken or dead. Here at Attitude Towers, we expressed cautious optimism on learning that Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield, of Social Network fame, had been cast in the leads -- if nothing else, we'd have something nice to look at while we wept silently into our hankies. And the confirmation that Sir Ian McKellen (our living patron saint) was to play the role of Jacques made us feel positively obliged to trot along on premiere night. But it's the off-camera story that's captured our imaginations, and guaranteed that Giovanni's Room will go down in gay cinema history. And it hasn't even been released yet...
From pre-production on, the film was dogged by rumours: the producers had skimped on the budget because they thought a gay movie was too risky; Wright could barely tolerate Garfield's acting style and didn't much like him as a person; there were time-wasting communication errors between the (mostly British) lead crew and the (mostly French) low-level grunts. Then with only a few weeks of filming left on the schedule, a bootleg copy of an interview with Eisenberg turned up on video site Dailymotion -- only to be pulled a few hours later, due to alleged copyright infringements.
An Attitude staff member saw the video, though he sadly failed to download or transcribe it before it got pulled. In it, a visibly disoriented and sweaty Eisenberg, pale under the studio lights, rambles in a somewhat incoherent fashion about the hot Paris weather, race relations in America in the 1950s, and how easy it is to play a character who's in love when you're in love with your co-star for real.
Coming from any other Oscar nominee, this would have set the tabloids on fire -- but there were complications that kept the rumour mills from grinding as fast as normal. For one thing, Eisenberg was obviously confused and in a state of ill-health, so that the one rumour that did circulate widely was that he'd developed a drug habit. For another, he had been known to give strange and mischievous answers in interviews, once to the point of prompting an interviewer to say "Are you fucking with me?" in those exact words when he was promoting the movie Zombieland.
On top of that, his epic bromance with Garfield was already the stuff of legend long before they'd started making Giovanni's Room, with neither feeling any inhibitions about declaring their love for each other to all and sundry. We'd always assumed it was strictly platonic, and when there were reports from the set that Eisenberg had collapsed from dehydration and stress and was taking time off, we chalked the interview up to exhaustion-induced hyperbole and moved on. And when, two weeks later, co-star Garfield was seen on the Stonewall float at London Pride, chatting with Sir Ian, we chalked that up to coincidence, though those of us more inclined to wishful thinking were beginning to wonder whether the "bromance" was quite as brotherly as all that.
Fortunately, we didn't have to wonder for very long. Two days after the parade, still nursing our hangovers, we got an offer of an exclusive no-holds-barred interview with Garfield once principal photography was finished on Giovanni's Room. In the event, to our delight, he brought Eisenberg with him. What follows is a nearly unedited transcript of the interview we conducted with the pair. Trust us, it answers every question you have about them -- and probably some you didn't think of...
A: So, Jesse, I see you've had your hair done.
JE: Yeah, they had to do that for the movie. David, the character I play, is pretty much a classic WASP, you know, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, so the Jewfro look had to go. It's not very 1950s.
AG: I miss the curls.
JE: You know, I actually don't? I don't like the bleach because it looks weird, but this short cut is kind of -- I like the way it feels. It's sort of light. Especially in the hot weather.
AG: It is kind of summery. And I can see your forehead! Usually your forehead is hiding under your hair.
JE: There's nothing special about my forehead.
AG: I beg to differ.
A: So you play David, and Andrew, you play Giovanni.
AG: That's right.
A: Given that you've been friends for a while, what was it like to play lovers?
JE: It was basically hell. From start to finish, it was incredibly stressful and difficult.
AG: Yeah, it was -- do you want to tell him or shall I?
JE: Well, you start, and then when you get something wrong I'll step in.
AG: I love how you say "when", not "if".
JE: I'm just being realistic.
AG: You see what I have to put up with? Anyway. The day before we started filming, I arrived in Paris, at the apartment -- we were sharing an apartment, a very nice little place in the Marais.
A: Isn't that the gay neighbourhood?
AG: Yes, it is! I didn't know that at the time, but it is. And, anyway, we had a day out. We went book-shopping and we ate crepes and it was... I had this moment, when we got back, when I was suddenly blindsided with the revelation: I love this man, I am in love with him. And it's like, fuck! That's not good! I mean, it's wonderful, but it's also terrible, because firstly when you're friends, it's just... it's like, you've got something to lose. And you don't want to lose it. You don't want to fuck it up. And then, we were going to be making this film and it was going to be so hard. It was going to be hard anyway, but what if I'd said something and Jesse had been "well, thanks, but no thanks"? We'd still have to go through the motions, and that would have been really awkward.
A: When you say "go through the motions", you mean things like kissing?
AG: And sex scenes. Which are -- obviously it's not a porn film so we're not actually having sex, but there's some things you can't fake. And I felt like: this is absolutely the worst possible time for this to happen, for me to figure this out.
JE: It's good that you didn't tell me then, because I would have really freaked out.
AG: When did you figure it out? I'm sorry, I feel like I should have asked you this before.
JE: No, it's okay. I don't really remember a distinct moment when I went from not-knowing to knowing. Like, there were times when I was -- the thing that not a lot of people know is that the symptoms of strong sexual attraction are pretty similar to the symptoms of an incoming panic attack. So I was having these very confusing moments when I'd be hanging around with Andrew and suddenly getting a dry mouth, racing heart, shortness of breath, and thinking "crap, do I need to call my therapist, do I need to go back on the meds, what the hell". And then you kissed me that first time, and it was obvious that that wasn't it.
A: This was a screen kiss?
AG: No, no, actually -- shall I?
JE: Yeah, go ahead.
AG: Even though I'd decided I wasn't going to say anything, at least not straight away, I had this very strong feeling that I didn't want our first kiss to be in front of the cameras. So I sort of escorted Jesse to a dressing room and...
JE: And you told me to hold still.
AG: I didn't want to scare you.
JE: So... that was our first kiss. And then there was the second one, because the first one was kind of one-sided. And then I knew I wanted to be doing that for real, but I don't remember exactly when that transitioned into actually being in love, or even being aware of being in love.
A: Am I hearing this right? You two were in love with each other?
AG: Are! Present tense.
JE: And future.
AG: And future. Yeah, and that made it harder. Well, easier in some ways because there was no need to fake any of the emotion, the attachment -- but then, harder too, because when your own real feelings are involved, you have to keep them under control. And that's -- and then, we were, I was keeping myself in check all the time, when we weren't in character.
JE: So was I. All the time, I was obsessing over it -- was I showing too much, could you see what I was feeling, was I freaking you out.
AG: I had no idea.
JE: Neither did I.
A: So you're together now?
AG: Yes. Yes, we are.
JE: Since the wrap party.
AG: Yeah, that was when we finally got together.
JE: It was -- in a way, it was good, because we'd already done a lot of -- there's this awkward moment when you're kissing someone for the first time and you're not sure where to put your hands or how to angle your face. That was not a problem. We'd had plenty of practice.
A: That's got to lend an extra authenticity to the film.
AG: That's probably the only reason my agent let me do this interview.
JE: Your agent is kind of a hardass.
AG: No, she's not! She's very good at what she does. She's just... she's very firm.
JE: That sounds like a polite way of saying "hardass".
AG: It's just that, I mean, I had a chat with Ian -- Sir Ian -- he doesn't like it when you call him that to his face -- and he said "you might find yourself not getting offered roles you would have got before". And it's early days yet, so who knows? But, yeah, I'm sure people are going to be interested. I mean, I would. If there was a film, like a romantic film, where the lead actors fell in love for real -- it adds an extra layer to it.
JE: Do you think people are going to think we're faking it? For publicity?
AG: That would be hilarious.
JE: Considering how long we spent pretending to each other that there was nothing going on, there would be something sort of pleasingly ironic about it.
AG: But you know, it's -- I mean, I don't really care. And that probably sounds ridiculous since we're doing this interview to tell people all about it, but... I mean, I want to shout it from the rooftops because I feel so, for lack of a, this is going to sound really cheesy but I just feel blessed. I really do. Just knowing Jesse at all is amazing, and then to be with Jesse like this is a --
JE: Oh, stop.
AG: You love it really.
JE: You're making me blush.
AG: You're cute when you blush.
JE: That's not helping.
AG: But, anyway. I don't care what people think. I don't want to have to hide this, because it's the best thing in my life, Jesse is the best thing in my life. People can believe that or not, I don't care.
A: I think anyone who saw you together would believe it.
AG: Aw, really?
A: You're still in the honeymoon period, right?
JE: Mm. That's one way of putting it.
A: It shows.
JE: There are so many ways to interpret that.
A: Well, you're sitting really close together, for one thing...
JE: That was another thing that made it hard. I mean, when you're friends you can do a lot of casual, sort of... touching and it doesn't matter because it doesn't mean anything. Then these new feelings come along and suddenly everything means something, and it becomes really difficult to negotiate your way through a lot of things that used to be very straightforward. Like, for instance, there was that time when Andrew didn't wear a shirt at breakfast for a week.
AG: It wasn't a week! It was maybe three days. And it was really hot.
JE: Yes. Yes, it was. But that's not the point. The point is, if we're just friends, it's nothing. It's totally normal for somebody to sit around without a shirt on, if there's a heatwave. But then for me, it was like: oh, hey, Andrew's not wearing a shirt, great, now I have to wait for him to leave the room before I can stand up.
AG: Really?
JE: You have no idea.
AG: I wasn't doing it on purpose.
JE: I didn't think you were.
A: Was this around the time you did the interview for French television?
JE: Yes. Did you see it?
A: I didn't, but I heard about it from someone who did.
JE: I don't even remember it. I was completely out of it.
A: Apparently you looked very confused.
JE: At that point I hadn't eaten for about 36 hours, and like I said, there was a heatwave. So I wasn't really aware of what I was saying.
AG: And then you had a panic attack.
JE: Yeah. And that was...
AG: It was scary. I mean, it was scary for me. I can't imagine what it was like for you.
JE: But then I -- you were really nice to me, and it was actually kind of... There can be this pressure when you're dreading something, when you feel like if it happens, that's going to be the end of the world. Well, it happened. Not just the interview but the attack afterward, those were my worst-case scenarios. And the world didn't end. And then we had a really nice afternoon.
AG: I think that was when I started to think maybe you felt something for me, too.
JE: I was too exhausted to pretend I didn't.
A: So you guys didn't know, all that time. Nothing was happening during the filming?
AG: No.
JE: No. Nothing -- no more than usual.
AG: I felt like -- I mean, in hindsight it looks a bit silly. We were sort of pining for each other for, what, four months? But I really felt it was impossible.