Creating a hero

That’s enough about Juliette for the moment. What about my hero?

Simon
Simon Ratcliffe is a young actor in his mid-twenties, a year or two older than Juliette. He’s a serious actor. Committed to all the things that a thorough professional would be. If anything, he’s over-committed. Acting is his passion. This provides a nice contrast to Juliette, who’s casting about for inspiration, and her brother Pierre’s commitment to making money, and her mother’s commitment to being famous and impossible.

His first impressions of Juliette are largely negative, thanks mainly to his assumption that her path to the role of Breeze in the soap included a stop on Jonathan’s casting couch.

His character flaw is that he tends to be a little holier than thou—he makes snap judgements about others (and particularly actors) before all the evidence is in, and uses as his moral yardstick his own fierce commitment to the art.

But behind the shell he’s a softie. He loves to love and be loved. But he doesn’t like to admit this—not yet at any rate. He still has a few years of growing up to do.

He, I think, has his own journey to make. He has to wean himself of his dependency on the soap. He has to throw himself into the cauldron of freelance work. He has to write that play that’s been lurking in him for the last three or four years. He has to take more risks. This implies, of course, that he’s been talking the talk of the high, bright art of stagecraft, but, while he earns his (very good) living from his part in The Parks, he’ll not have the space to explore the limits of his talent.

There’s room here for a great scene (actually a series of great scenes) in which Simon and Juliette each challenge the other to summon the courage to do what will stretch them the most.

“But if I do this—if I go to London and try my luck there—or write my play and stage it here—how can I be sure I’ll succeed?”

“You can’t,” says Juliette, “and that’s the point…”

So he resigns from the soap—as does she. He commits himself to finishing his play—or going to London (the alternatives give me scenes in which he’s making up his mind, balancing his ambition against his love for Juliette.)

What about Simon’s background? He’s 26 or 27. He studied drama at the University of Cape Town. He quotes a professor frequently who had a huge effect on him, although the man himself was decidedly dodgy. (He was caught seducing a student—perhaps a man—and drummed out of the university. Perhaps this happens during the course of our story—perhaps it triggers in Simon a crisis of confidence the conclusion of which is that he decides that all he’s good for is playing the love interest in a soap. It takes Juliette’s faith in him to bring him round. This before she has decided what she wants to be or do—but what she does know is that she doesn’t simply want to be the inspiration for a man and his vocation—as happy as she has been to serve in that role for Simon.)

Where does he live? In a houseful of actors, a couple of whom work on the show, including one gay guy, older, very camp (who could be the writer I’ve inserted into Juliette’s story—although elsewhere I’ve described him as happily married.)

Family? His older brother and sister have emigrated to Australia and Canada. His father flits between the two married, settled children and a flat in Inanda. Simon doesn’t see very much of him. No problems there.

Girlfriends? He’s something of a dreamboat, and given his public profile, he has girls throwing themselves at him constantly. (On one occasion he takes a pair of panties out of his jacket pocket and explains to an astonished Juliette that a girl stopped him in the supermarket that morning, stripped off her knickers, gave them to him and asked him to think of her, before giggling and dashing off.)

What does he do for fun? He loves cooking—badly. He runs. He writes. He reads. He is passionate about many things. He has strong opinions, but—and this Juliette finds utterly charming—he is very quick to admit he’s wrong. “How do I know what I think until I hear what I say?” he sometimes says—and it’s not only a joke. He invents statistics to support his arguments—and when he’s caught out, he argues that the statistic could well be, in all probability, accurate.

His looks: he is classically handsome. In fact his looks embarrass him. He is not too tall, although he’s comfortably taller than Juliette. In certain lights and at certain angles he looks impossibly young. He has a shock of uncontrollable russet hair. He is careless about his appearance.

He would like to be remembered—not that he has ever expressed or even thought this thought—for throwing everything he has into doing what he’s chosen to do. He remembers with contempt the advice of an old schoolmaster at the second rate private school he attended which went like this: Never put off till tomorrow what you can put off till next week. Or an elderly uncle of his who insisted that “if you have your health you have everything.”