when I first notice, it’s a Monday. It’s six a.m., and we’re all bleary-eyed, trying to shake off whatever ruckus the weekend caused and get our heads back into the game. Me, I had an interview yesterday that felt a lot more like running an obstacle course. After that, all I wanted to do was hit the showers, but no, we had to go from that straight into a photoshoot. And the hairdresser’s DOG was there, no joke, right behind the camera, yipping and yapping and scaring the bejesus out of me right when the shutter clicked. Add that to someone’s perfume making me want to sneeze and I must have snapped some good pics, my ears perking up and my nose twitching.
But Monday’s a workday, so all of that goes by the wayside. We’re in makeup, trying to memorize our lines. I have a scene with Mark today. He and I are fighting over the girl. Look, I know the face I have to put on for the magazines. We love the storylines, we love our characters, we really care about the state of daytime drama. It’s bullshit. I’m sorry, I really do love my job, but let’s face it. Luke Hathaway is as far from a real person as you’re going to get. I mean, “I swear I’ll do everything in my power to stop you”? For real? People don’t say that these days even if they mean it.
But people do watch it, and that means I’m getting my face powdered up and mouthing “everything in my power” over and over with my caffeine-starved Monday morning brain. My kingdom for a cup of tea, swear to God.
So this is when I notice it, right? It’s when Ryan turns the page of his script and finds the paper isn’t really willing to comply. So he scrunches up his forehead– and I see this all out of the corner of my eye, since I have to look away to get the eye makeup (yes, they give us eye makeup, but I digress)– and he finally licks his forefinger and flips the page up.
And his face gets this very serene, pleased look on it. I think to myself, just an idle thought in the corner of my mind, if I were a photographer, I’d want to shoot him like this. Because with his eyes angled down like that and a bit of blush on his cheek like that he really looks almost like something out of another world. Just really fucking beautiful. And then I think about something else again.
It’s maybe a half-hour later when we’re well into shooting and I realize I’m still framing him in my head, getting good camera angles, appreciating the way he tilts his head and the heaviness in his stride. I’m filming a documentary on Ryan Markey in my head, and I’m the director and the cameraman. It’s bizarre.
I’ve worked with Ryan for what, about three months now? We don’t know each other that well, but mostly that’s because we haven’t shot together. He’s starting to get tangentially involved with the Hathaway clan– well, “Andrew Starr” is… and so now we’re shooting at the same time of day if not in the same scenes yet. This is the closest I’ve gotten to him.
I’m not quite sure I know what it means, if it means anything. But I come away from the day with the feeling that if nothing else, Ryan Markey’s a nice thing to look at. If only I didn’t have this feeling in the pit of my stomach that that’s not all there is to it.
