HEY, i think i just saw TOMO KATSUMURA(-VITELLI) walking down the strip. stop by to catch up and you’ll learn the TWENTY-EIGHT YEAR OLD is working as an ACTOR and lives in MANOR SUITES. given they are CHARMING but ERRATIC, it’s unlikely that they ARE NOT a vampire. on the flipside, rumor has it that HE KEEPS FAKING SCANDALS AND DRAMA TO GET OUT OF UNWANTED PRIOR COMMITMENTS (BECAUSE HE KNOWS HE CAN GET AWAY WITH IT) and it keeps them looking over their shoulder. i bet you can find them tearing up the dance floor to EVERY YOU, EVERY ME by PLACEBO and you’ll know why they’re called THE RISING STAR. ( cis man + he/him. bisexual + scorpio. )
IMPORTANT LINKS: stats. pinterest.
TW: drugs & alcohol, car crashes, mental health issues, parental death/suicide
BASICS.
Tomo's full birthname is actually Tomoaki Katsumura (勝村智秋), meaning that his legal name is Tomoaki Katsumura-Vitelli, but he prefers to go by Tomo Katsumura (勝村智). Pretty much the only person allowed to call him Tomoaki is his maternal grandma. He also doesn't really take well to nicknames unless they're approved by him. He just really feel like Tomo is his name 100%. He does not use the Vitelli name in professional work as an actor.
He speaks both English and Japanese fluently, and doesn't really consider one to be his native tongue over the other. He's been entirely bilingual his whole life and spent large chunks of his childhood living in Osaka, Japan with his grandmother. He has been known to use Osaka-ben (dialect) when speaking Japanese. For a variety of reasons, Tomo also attended middle school/junior high in Osaka until his mother moved to him to Las Vegas.
His parents divorced when he was 10 and his father died when he was 13. His mother's relationship with Augustus began when Tomo was about 15. This means he has spent just under half his life as a Vitelli.
For the most part, Tomo’s a friendly and energetic guy! When he’s at his best, he’s great company. He likes to stand out in a crowd, has a winning smile and enjoys attention but also knows when to step back and look out for other people.
He’s kind of an emotional wreck. He does his best not to show it on the surface and the whole…being a good actor thing probably helps with that but, beneath the top layers of Sparkly Glam Tomo, shit’s all scrambled up. He doesn’t really know what to make of himself. Acting and having friends present are the only things, he believes, keeping him grounded and together.
Yet he’s pretty good at pretending shit’s fine, he’s still weirdly positive for a guy who feels all messed up — maybe he gets away with it because he’s a good actor. He’s the kind of guy who can have a full-on breakdown in his room by himself and then just reappear & ask you if you wanna go for ice cream because, hey, he’s bored. Basically, OKAY, that’s done with, that already happened. It’s OVER.
He doesn’t like crying in front of people which is rough bc he’s emotional ALL the time. He’s a total crybaby when he’s drunk. If you drink with him, there WILL be a point at which you have to scoop him up off the floor because he’s found something over which to start weeping. OR he’ll end up calling you to panic about how he can’t find his way home, only for him to realise like 5 minutes later he’s phoning you from the phone booth at the end of his own street.
He doesn’t like dating because…well, he likes the IDEA of it but he’s the type to really fall for someone and BASICALLY? He’s scared of being dumped! He’s a bright & appealing personality with just enough edge to balance it out but he’s a bit of an emotional screwball and he feels like getting people interested is easier than keeping them interested, leading to mixed experiences with dating so he’s…kinda…settled for sleeping around a little instead. Oh well, whatever works! (does it actually work? shhhh it’s a secret…)
Tomo is a competent singer. This is because, growing up, his mother made him take singing lessons in the hopes that he might follow in her idol footsteps. He was not in the least bit interested but it was fun enough for him not to complain about it (not that it would’ve helped).
He’s not very good at watching himself in films. It depends on the film and he can do it but uhhhh let’s just say he once watched the one horror film he was in at the cinema (and didn’t like most of it bc he’s a wuss about that sort of thing) but he laughed during his own death scene. There were tears in his eyes. Real tears.
He’s very much involved in the party scene, whatever country he’s in. it’s not something he talks about much (privately, i mean, bc DUH he doesn’t say it publicly) but he doesn’t exactly avoid drugs in anyway. It's all pretty casual and he only really does it at parties but he has been known to do coke and ecstasy and other stimulants. Will NOT touch weed. Don't ask. He does smoke cigarettes though and he’s a little dependent on that.
I guess he got involved in that kinda thing deliberately because he wants to distance himself from the clean-cut, shiny heartthrob pretty boy image as much as possible. Eventually, it just became a natural way of de-stressing and dealing with the constant frustration of his career. The unfortunate consequence of that is that he’s now got a bit of a Bad Boy/Wild Child image and he’s not entirely sure he likes that either. (The shift in image also means that some journalists will talk about him as though he’s ‘gone off the rails’ and, yeah, he hates that as well.)
BACKSTORY
Tomo was the centre of scandals from Day One; born to a young American actor and a Japanese pop idol, he was the catalyst for his parents' shotgun marriage. Their marriage would only last about a decade with the pair divorcing when Tomo was around ten years old and his mother winning primary custody.
His mother, Mitsuko Furuya, was born in Japan and debuted as an idol in her teens (this would have been in the early 70s; she was 21 when Tomo was born). She was successful enough for her company to drag her abroad, just to test the waters. It was here that she fell for Ken Katsumura. Her pregnancy ended her career for several years and she would not return to the spotlight until Tomo was a teenager. Her relationship with Tomo is strained and they can't see eye to eye. She tried to push Tomo to follow her footsteps as a pop idol from a young age but he was only interested in acting.
His father, Ken Katsumura, was an actor-turned-director. He was a troubled person and an absent husband who put his work first, and this led to Mitsuko filing for divorce some years into their marriage. That, and the final admission that their early infatuation hadn't been love and their marriage had been for convenience all along. He poured himself further into his work while his mental health continued to deteriorate, falling into depression and alcoholism, and eventually killed himself at the age of 36. Tomo was thirteen years old at the time.
Tomo moved about a lot growing up, specifically back and forth between LA and Osaka (where his mother's family lived). He also lived in Japan and attended school there between the ages of 10 and 13. His mother had taken the divorce as an opportunity to return home and revive her career, focusing now on becoming a TV personality. During this time, he lived with his grandmother in Osaka while his mother was busy in Tokyo.
They moved back to the States when his mother got involved with the Vitelli family, causing mother & sun to finally settle in Las Vegas. Although Tomo resented the idea of being dragged into a new family when his father had hardly been dead all that long, he'd immediately won over his step-father; not the favourite but adored nonetheless, just not in a way that demands any responsibility of him. Maybe it makes sense; he's a bright and charming child, sharp and ambitious, but completely reckless and full of terrible, terrible ideas.
He started acting professionally when he was sixteen, mostly with a few smaller TV roles but he had good connections and was able to get a small but still substantial role in the film directed by a friend of his dad. His big break, however, came at age 18 when he landed a leaded a role in the main cast of high school drama.
It was exciting at first, being on TV and being famous, but he soon found hated both the show and his character so the whole thing got tired fast. One of his biggest issues with the tv show was that he didn’t like being sold as a product / character that wasn’t anything like him, being shown off as this squeaky clean teen heartthrob type and not being allowed to have his own emotions & tastes.
His contract prevented him from quitting when he liked (and the writers were ‘stubbornly’ unwilling to kill his character off; he thought it’d be fun to act out) and he was signed on for a third season of the show. Tomo decided he might as well take things into his own hands went out of his way to get himself fired. He could have simply used the Vitelli money to pay his way out of the contract but there was a certain thrill in taking matters into his own hands. It was his first act of public rebellion and, by design, his first criminal offence. He was twenty years old when he staged his own arrest for DUI. Being a minor, he didn’t need to drink much to get in trouble and he wasn’t drunk at the time. In order to ensure hje was noticed, Tomo drove his car into a tree, The crash awarded him with a broken arm and a suspended license but, more importantly, it got him fired.
The media had gotten hold of his story too, twisting it into the sort of drama that assured the public would see him as just another child actor gone wrong, but this was short-lived. Finally, he'd allow the Vitelli name to save him from falling into too much trouble. At this point, something clicked in his mind. He could tear this perfect pretty boy image apart with his own hands and hardly feel the consequences. He was too protected for all that. This has led to an unfortunate habit of him doing whatever he likes, just to push the limits of what he can get away with and also just to get out shit he doesn't want to be doing. This has allowed him to freedom to generally do what he wants, under the belief that he's somewhat untouchable. Who knows when this will bite him in the ass?
Despite this, Tomo is genuinely a nice person and always treats the crews on his movie projects with nothing but respect. (Note that he also swore off television because he hates it now.)
