#we all know Trevor is peruvian

[themesozoicsperm]

Trevor invites Hilda to eat Ceviche for Valentine’s day!

This has to be the cutest Hilda ship ever. Fanart by Fabz_RC on twitter.

[vernonfielding]

You don’t know what I went through

Aaaaaaaaaaaand here’s a little something from Captain Kim. I was intrigued by Jake’s comments about the men Karen dated after Roger. Thank you to @fezzle for the awesome beta (she is seriously The Best) and to @feeisamarshmallow for talking through Jake’s dad and stepdad issues with me.

The title is from IHOP (Bash Brothers ofc).

Read on AO3!

Amy waits until after dinner, when Jake is slumped back on the couch beside her and flipping through Netflix options, to ask the question that’s been bubbling in the back of her mind since the briefing that morning.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me about the limo drivers?”

Jake lifts an eyebrow and spares her a quick, questioning glance. “Huh?”

“The men your mom dated,” Amy says. “Trevor and Rolf?”

“Oh, yeah.” Jake shrugs. “They were just random guys.”

He selects ‘The Circle’ and gives Amy a smile that he probably means to be charming but comes across slightly more desperate than winning. Amy thinks about limo drivers and Roger and the carousel of captains they’ve had since Holt was demoted, and sighs.

“Fine, but you’re going to tell me about them later.”

Jake hits play and pulls Amy toward him, folding his arms around her. He’s warm and sturdy and he smells faintly of the lemongrass chicken they had for dinner, and it’s easy to let it go, for now.

+++

Amy’s known for a while that Karen dated quite a bit after Roger. Amy loves Karen – loves her laugh and her inherent sweetness and her well-meaning heart, and it isn’t surprising that she would have met other men after Roger, that she would have been sought after, even. But it somehow never occurred to Amy, as Karen spilled sordid stories while they sipped chilled red wine in her art studio garage, that the men would have been in Jake’s life too, at least some of them. 

The thought gnaws at her that night, after they’ve binged on the first three episodes of ‘The Circle’ (so dumb but honestly addictive) and gone to bed, that Jake was abandoned not just by Roger, but by a parade of bad men.

She can still recall, in excruciating detail, their structured debate at the hospital – how Jake feared he would be a bad parent because of his own crappy dad, how he owned his issues with authority figures. Then and now, he’s always blamed Roger, and Amy has too. But she sees a fuller picture now. She sees that Jake never had a chance. The only men he knew growing up were adulterers and liars, jerks who not only ran away, but who hurt his mom, the one adult he loved the most, and the only one he ever could count on.

They haven’t started trying for a baby just yet, but they will, soon. And when she thinks about where Jake came from it strikes her how brave he is, to be taking this step. And how much faith he must have in Amy herself, and in what they have together.

Jake mumbles something in his sleep and shifts on his pillow, and Amy’s heart stutters. She slides an arm over his chest, fingers curling into his shirt, and brushes a kiss just below his ear.

“I love you,” she says, whisper-soft. Jake sleeps on.

+++

The next night they get takeout from a new Peruvian place in the neighborhood. Amy makes them eat at the table, and she waits until Jake’s taken a few bites of an empanada before she says, “Tell me about Trevor and Rolf.”

Jake’s eyes widen a bit in surprise, and he chews slowly and takes a long drink of orange soda before answering.

“What do you want to know?”

Amy shrugs. “Did you like them? I mean, before-”

“Yeah,” Jake says. “They were nice. Before.”

Amy’s not sure what to do next, if she should press for more information, if she wants to, if Jake wants her to, if it matters. But then Jake clears his throat and says, “Trevor came along about a year after my dad split. He’d always bring my mom flowers, which I thought was super classy, and he’d take both of us out for dinner like once a week. My mom and I, we didn’t go out to dinner much then, after Dad left. So it felt really special, you know?”

Amy nods, and stabs at a fried plantain with a fork, suddenly not feeling all that hungry. “How long did they date?”

“A few months, I guess,” Jake says. “I, uh, found a pair of women’s underwear in the back of the limo one day and my mom asked him about it – I think she thought it was funny, like some customers had gotten it on or something – but he admitted to cheating on her right then, like in our living room on our way out for ice cream. She told him to leave and he did, and we never saw him again.”

“Jake, I’m-” She catches the flash of something hard and frustrated on his face and pauses. “That sucks.”

“It does,” Jake says, the anger already gone, replaced by something more fragile. “Anyway, Rolf showed up a couple months later, and he was fun. He used to drive me to school in his limo sometimes, Gina too. He’d let us open the sunroof and stand on the seats in the back with our heads poking out of the top. It was so illegal but we loved it.

“Then my mom and I saw him making out with twins at the pizza place near our house and he was gone too.”

“Wait- what? Twins?”

“Oh yeah, he was gross. Like, really gross.”

Amy laughs then, and so does Jake, because what else can they do, Amy thinks. And Jake tells her about Preston and Brendan and Brandon and Lyle, and Amy feels a tug of frustration with Karen, that she put Jake through all of that, so many times.

But Jake says, “After Lyle, my mom just kind of-” He pauses and bites his lip. “There were a few years where- I don’t know. I was worried. She wasn’t the same.”

Amy tries to imagine Karen Peralta – ebullient and joyful and full of so much love, always drawn to these losers. And Amy’s not angry but sad, and also, suddenly, overcome with respect for this woman: Despite it all, she raised the boy who became the bright and beautiful man sitting across from her now.

She recalls Jake’s confounding parallel, when they’d been invited to Captain Kim’s party. Trevor, he’d said, had preyed on his mom, had preyed on Jake too, so he could win their trust and take advantage of them. Jake had told them that Captain Kim was the same, which was ridiculous and paranoid, but also- Amy gets it.

Jake has trouble with trust, and he may always struggle with authority figures, but still he pushed past all of that and forged an unbreakable bond with Holt, and is it any wonder that he’s holding so fiercely to their captain? That he’s rejected every replacement outright?

Jake’s returned to his empanadas, a thoughtful frown on his brow, and Amy’s tempted to soothe it, to change the subject or just make him laugh again. But she’s learned that sometimes Jake needs to sit with his troubles and work through them, and maybe this, now, is one of those times.

Still – she reaches across the table and brushes a thumb over the back of his hand. His eyes are dark when he looks up at her, but he turns his hand over and clasps her fingers in his own, and he smiles before taking another bite.

He’s going to be fine, of course. But Amy thinks tomorrow she’ll call Karen and see if she’s up for brunch with her son and daughter-in-law this weekend. And she’s going to talk to Officer Holt – it’s time they came up with a plan.

She squeezes Jake’s fingers before letting go and returning to her own dinner. Jake still carries so much hurt, she thinks, but he’s strong. And he’s not alone.

[moonwest]

Full Ben Whishaw Interview in Sunday Times Magazine

Ben Whishaw, the voice of Paddington, the millennial Q in the Bond films, the next generation of Mr Banks in Disney’s epic Mary Poppins reboot, is fresh off the plane from LA. He is wearing a navy shirt, dark wool trousers and a fluffy knitted hat over his lush curls. It’s a strange combination of quirkiness and elegance. At the start of the year he won a Golden Globe and a Critics’ Choice award for his captivating portrayal of Norman Scott opposite Hugh Grant’s Jeremy Thorpe in A Very English Scandal. Of course he says he didn’t expect to win, and of course he says it feels great, but when I ask if this recognition from Hollywood means he’ll spend more time out there, he says: “No idea. I don’t feel it’s my world. I just sort of dropped in and it was a lovely thing. I would like to drop in more often. Maybe it opens doors. I guess we’ll see.”

For now, it’s back to the day job. Whishaw, 38, is rehearsing a play called Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, in which he plays a man who likes to dress up as Marilyn Monroe. “We just got the costumes,” he says. “I wear a dress that’s a replica of the one she wore in The Seven Year Itch — the white one where the wind comes up. They’ve also given me the bum, hips and breasts. I don’t think they’re as big as Marilyn’s, but they’re proportionate to my body. It’s a strange thing. I’m not playing Marilyn, I’m playing a man who’s infatuated with her. The play is set in the year she died and he’s in mourning for her. Apparently there was a spate of copycat suicides that year.”

To research the role, Whishaw has been reading a book called Fragments. “It’s bits of Marilyn’s diary, notes on hotel paper, poetry,” he says. “She writes beautifully. Arthur Miller was here with her when they were doing the film The Prince and the Showgirl, and she opened his diary and read about how disappointed he was with her, how embarrassed he was being around his intellectual friends with her. Apparently this was devastating to Marilyn. All these men say how difficult she was. It makes you want to strangle them. But she really was amazing. She had a lot going on, a lot of sadness on her plate, poor darling. To be a star in that star system and those men.”

If she had been born 50 years later, does he think she would have been part of the #MeToo movement? “I’m sure she would have. I’ve been listening to interviews with her. She doesn’t seem afraid of anything.”

Fearless and vulnerable. It’s a contradiction that could possibly describe both of them. “Yes,” he smiles.

Almost 15 years have passed since Whishaw, fresh out of Rada, was acclaimed as one of the best ever Hamlets in the Trevor Nunn production at the Old Vic. His portrayal earned him an Olivier nomination and opened the door to film and television roles. He voiced Michael Bond’s Peruvian stowaway bear in the two recent Paddington films and is lined up for a third, as well as an animated TV series for Nickelodeon. Perhaps his best known role is Q in the Bond films Skyfall (2012) and Spectre (2015). As soon as he’s finished his Marilyn, he will begin shooting the next one, though no one in a Bond movie can tell you in advance what it’s going to be like. “I think they’re probably trying to figure out what to do with the storyline,” he says. “At least I know that my character is the same. Someone did tell me there might be a scene with Q’s cats.”

I immediately want to sort out an audition for my cat Roger Moore.

“Does Roger travel?” he asks. “Could he go to Pinewood? And can he cock an eyebrow?”

Yes, he can. That’s why he’s called Roger Moore.

“I’ll get onto Barbara Broccoli about it,” he says.

Whishaw has created an ever-widening niche for himself — he has made room in film, theatre and television for malleable, sensitive male characters that are sometimes described as androgynous, but what they really are is sexually ambiguous.

“Do you think I’m androgynous? I think I’m quite male-looking. Androgyny is different to non-binary, but I hate all these labels. I get mixed up.”

It’s true, there are many labels; nonetheless Whishaw is a 21st-century man. When you think of those macho actors of the last century, men like Rock Hudson, who revealed he was gay only when he was dying of Aids, it seems so different now.

Whishaw entered a civil partnership with the Australian composer Mark Bradshaw in 2012, but for a long time he did not discuss his private life. He would say things like, “An actor shouldn’t reveal their sexuality because it pigeonholes them.” Once he had come to terms with it himself, however, hiding it became difficult in a different way. “People assume there’s some juicy secret,” he says. “But I don’t agree any more with that statement [about being pigeonholed]. I don’t think it’s the be-all and end-all, and since revealing my sexuality I haven’t had any negative effects.”

Perhaps that’s because he is such a skilful actor, perhaps the pigeonholes aren’t as rigid as they used to be, or perhaps the revelation has actually helped him. He shrugs. He doesn’t mind talking about it now, it’s just he can’t be conclusive.

At one point, Whishaw was lined up to play Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, although he was never given a contract or confirmed officially. Various versions of the biopic had been on the cards for about 10 years. Sacha Baron Cohen was in the frame first of all, then Whishaw, and ultimately Rami Malek. The film has been accused of not being “gay enough”, but, for all the criticism, Malek’s career-defining role won him an Oscar.

We talk about how hard it was for Mercury to admit that he was gay and how he would refer to himself as bisexual. But then perhaps he was. He certainly had sexual relationships with women. “I think it’s very unfair when people say they’re bisexual and they’re accused of being gay really,” Whishaw says. “If we’re honest about these things, perhaps most people are on a spectrum.”

Whatever the risks he took in revealing his sexuality to the public, Whishaw found it much harder coming out to his family. “I’ve gone through a few difficult things,” he says. “There was a moment in my early twenties when I did not feel very good about myself. It was to do with my sexuality and not knowing how to be myself and hating myself. I did know [my sexuality], I just couldn’t tell anyone.”

When he eventually told his parents, they weren’t surprised, but he still struggled. He sought therapy. “It really did help,” he says.

He carries himself with such a sense of otherness that I am surprised to learn he is a twin. “We were born on the same day and we came out of the same place at the same time, but we are totally unalike,” he says. “Perhaps you can see we are related, but we don’t look alike. He’s blond. He came out first and was very pink and chubby. And I was this squashed, dark thing that popped out a few moments after. We were so different, but we were always dressed the same and taken everywhere together, even to things I was not interested in, like football. So I’ve always defined myself by him, but in opposition to him. I like everything different to him. There’s not a single thing we have in common, except we both liked the scary rides if we were taken to a park.”

Don’t twins normally have a kind of supernatural understanding? “No. No understanding, no telepathy. When I told him [about being gay], he wasn’t surprised, of course, but still.”

He notices a black crystal around my neck and I explain that it was given to me by my hypnotherapist.

“I’d like to try hypnotherapy,” he says. For what? “Smoking,” he says. “It’s so frowned upon. You feel ostracised from the world if you smoke. And there’s the hair twiddling thing.” He starts twiddling his hair. “I’ve probably been doing this for the whole interview.” He hasn’t, but apparently it’s been a lifelong habit. “I’ve done it since I was a baby. I don’t know why I do it.”

I recall the title of a Peter Cook anthology: Tragically, I Was an Only Twin. That’s what Whishaw seems like. I can’t imagine him with a brother. “My dad says if my brother and I were one person we would be an amazing, perfect human,” he replies.

It’s often reported that his father works in IT, but that’s not true. “He lives in the countryside and raises chickens behind a farm. He used to be a footballer and he now works in sports with young people. He’s not an IT person at all,” Whishaw laughs. His mother works in cosmetics. They split up when he was a young boy, but he has good relationships with both of them. He talks about them with love.

The last time we met, Whishaw told me he was afraid of meeting people. “I haven’t got over that,” he says. “I love people, but I’m just shy of meeting new people, especially when they’re famous.”

In particular, he was bashful around Meryl Streep, whom he starred alongside in Mary Poppins. “I’m so completely left speechless when I’m in the same room as her. Do you never feel that speechlessness come on you?” he asks sweetly. “Even though she seemed to be the nicest person, I was very timid and shy around her.”

It’s odd how someone so shy can look so confident — smouldering even — on screen.

He walks off in the furry hat that makes him look part man, part mole. It’s certainly a statement. But perhaps the most curious thing about Whishaw is we’ll never entirely know what that statement is.

Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is showing at the Shed’s Bloomberg Building, New York, April 6-May 19; theshed.org