HEY, i think i just saw EDWARD WEISS walking down the strip. stop by to catch up and you’ll learn the FIFTY-FIVE YEAR OLD is working as THE GODFATHER (DON) OF THE WEISS FAMILY and lives in THE WEISS MANOR. given they are ASTUTE but MERCILESS, it’s likely that they ARE NOT a vampire. on the flipside, rumor has it that HE KILLED HIS FATHER FOR BECOMING A LIABILITY and it keeps them looking over their shoulder. i bet you can find them tearing up the dance floor to THE LAST MAN ON EARTH BY WOLF ALICE and you’ll know why they’re called THE DEADLY EYE. ☾ .⭒˚ cillian murphy. cis man + he/him. heterosexual + scorpio.
PINTEREST / PLAYLIST / CHARACTER STUDY
basics:
full name: Edward James Weiss.
nicknames: Generally not a fan of nicknames, viewing them as a form of unearned intimacy and, in some cases, a direct challenge to his authority. He’ll begrudgingly tolerate Eddie from a very select handful of people, but anything else is liable to be treated as an overstep. Fortunately, most people are sensible enough not to start inventing pet names for someone with such a well-earned reputation for volatility.
name meaning: Wealthy guardian/prosperous protector.
gender: Cis man.
pronouns: He/him.
sexuality: Heterosexual.
age: Fifty-five years old.
date of birth: October 31st, 1941.
zodiac sign: Scorpio.
residence: Weiss Manor.
birthplace: London, England.
occupation: Godfather/Don of the Weiss family.
species: Human.
relationship status: Married.
appearance:
faceclaim: Cillian Murphy.
height: 5′8″
eyes: Icy blue eyes, known for unblinking stares and a beloved pastime of rolling them at what he considers the eternal stupidity of the world around him. They might be beautiful eyes if they belonged to someone else, but, as with most things, Edward has managed to turn them into a weapon.
hair: Thick brown hair threaded with grey, worn in a disconnected undercut. Left to its own devices, it's naturally quite wavy and entirely unwilling to cooperate, curling the moment it encounters rain or humidity.
piercings: N/a.
tattoos: Tba! I need to give this one more thought (and find some visual references). Whatever tattoos Edward does have would be deliberately understated and easy to conceal, meaning most people would assume he has none at all. Likely possibilities include something commemorating the birth of each of his daughters, a tribute to his first wife, and perhaps something connected to his late mother. Literary references and nods to Irish folklore also seem likely.
style: Immaculate three-piece suits are his comfort zone; it feels like a costume and, in many ways, that's exactly what it is. He's rarely seen wearing anything that could be considered casual; to Edward, informal means loosening his tie and rolling up his shirt-sleeves at the end of a day, not changing into something genuinely comfortable. He's also ridiculously stubborn/tries to act like he's immune to weather conditions. Faced with blazing heat, he'd sooner sweat through an expensive suit than admit he needs to remove any layers.
distinguishing characteristics: A seemingly incurable case of resting bitch face, sharp cheekbones, skin so pale it borders on deathly, a scattering of scars from various fights over the years, the most notable being a crescent-shaped scar beneath his left eye - a souvenir from a broken bottle that never healed quite right.
personality:
traits: Astute, callous, hypocritical, capricious, laconic, observant, stern.
labels / tropes: The Chessmaster, The Don, Visionary Villain, Toxic Family Influence, Like Father, Like Son, Nerves Of Steel, Selective Obliviousness, In The Blood.
mental health: Acknowledging the state of his mental health feels like opening a Pandora's box he'd much rather keep nailed shut, so he generally avoids doing so. He's very much inherited his father's habit of burying everything, as a man who viewed emotions as a nuisance and nothing more. Complicating matters further is a lingering streak of superstition inherited from his mother. Edward has never entirely shaken the belief that speaking about a problem only gives it more power, as though naming a fear or admitting to a struggle might invite it further into his life rather than being cathartic.
physical health: Smokes like a chimney and has done for years, though, aside from the daily punishment inflicted on his lungs, he'd insist he's in perfect health. He's still physically strong, the result of a lifetime spent getting into fights and refusing to stay out of them; bruised knuckles, split lips, the occasional black eye have been recurring features throughout much of his life. Now fifty-five, he maintains a modest amount of that strength through regular boxing. Despite his current position of power - and the fact he could easily have other people handle unpleasant situations for him - Edward takes a certain stubborn pride in knowing he can still defend himself if necessary.
fears: Irrelevancy, betrayal, leaving behind a disappointing legacy, weakness (both in himself and observed in others), having his authority undermined/losing power.
habits: Chain-smoking, running his hands through his hair when stressed or exhausted, disappearing for long, solitary walks without telling anyone where he's going - usually wandering the sprawling grounds of the Weiss manor or paying quiet visits to his mother's grave in Lychfield Graveyard, assuming the worst in people, prone to self-mythologising, swearing (he actively tries to curb it, viewing it as unbecoming of someone in his position, but old habits die hard and growing up amidst the rough-and-tumble chaos of the Weiss family has left him with a very colourful vocabulary).
personality type: INTJ.
biography:
Trigger warnings: descriptions of abuse, alcohol, bombs, drugs, organised crime, murder, violence, and war.
Summary: Edward, the Godfather of the Weiss family, grew up as the son of Irish immigrants who settled in London's East End during the interwar years in pursuit of a better life, only for the second world war to break out and shatter their plans. His childhood was defined by wartime difficulties, poverty, and dodging the unpredictable moods of his alcoholic father. Disgraced after being discharged from the front lines, his father drifted into a life of criminality - socially ostracised by his behaviour in France and unable to find honest work - and hung around with no end of questionable associates. Edward grew up among them and, by his teenage years, had established himself as the brains behind their best schemes. His father's drinking issues steadily worsened, eventually leading him to drunkenly reveal details of a major planned crime to the police, ruining the operation and nearly getting them all imprisoned. Enraged about it, and knowing his dad had become a liability to the cause, Edward initially tried to get him to step back from the group - and killed him when he refused to. He remained in London until the age of eighteen, then fled to Las Vegas when the British police began getting dangerously close to uncovering the truth about some of his crimes. He built the Weiss empire into what it is today, fell in love with his first wife, and had three daughters. The marriage broke down following a near miss - a bomb being set and detonated in their home - and his refusal to see it as a wake-up call to the danger his lifestyle was putting his family in. His wife disappeared under circumstances he refuses to discuss. In her absence, he raised their daughters harshly, pitting them against each other and thinking more about his legacy than their wellbeing. He has recently remarried and remains committed to his empire, at the expense of literally everything and everyone else.
PART ONE.
Halloween, 1941. An otherwise bleak, subdued evening in the East End of London, owing to wartime restrictions and a decline in public morale the longer hostilities continued. The Weiss family home was largely uninhabitable at the time of Edward's birth, having been badly damaged in the Blitz, but his parents had refused to relocate (typical Weiss stubbornness) so their son arrived into a world of brick-dust and boarded-up windows. It was a lightless arrival, too; strict blackout regulations remained in place, where even the faintest glow through a curtain could incur a fine. Edward's mother, a firm believer in apotropaic symbols and superstitious to a fault, liked to remind him that he'd been born in the dark; whenever he tested her patience (a regular occurrence), she'd blame the absence of lights warding off evil spirits on the night of his birth. That's why you turned out like you did, was her common refrain, half-lament, half-resignation. Because we didn't keep the devil out.
Even as a child, it struck him as bitterly ironic. As far as he was concerned, the devil had already made itself comfortable in the Weiss household, and it wore the face of his father, Frederick. A cruel and impossibly volatile man, with a propensity for violent, alcohol-fuelled outbursts, living with Frederick Weiss felt like living with a wild animal. His father had only spent four months posted to the frontlines before being discharged with ignominy for refusing to follow orders ("they were bloody stupid orders") and trying to fight his fellow soldiers ("they were bloody stupid soldiers.") He'd returned to London publicly disgraced, with hatred crawling through his veins at what he perceived to be an unfair dismissal.
Edward was often reminded to extend sympathy to his father, who'd dodged gunfire in the trenches and had to watch carrion-eating birds scavenge the broken bodies of his fellow countrymen, but Frederick made it difficult for anyone to feel sorry for him. The horrors of war could turn a man's heart to stone, that wasn't up for debate, but Edward knew, from the way everyone spoke about his father and recoiled in his presence, that his heart had been like that long before his boots touched French soil. It spoke volumes that even war, defined by its violence, had rejected him for being too brutal. How much of his cruelty could the war bear responsibility for, really? And how much of it was simply the product of being a Weiss?
PART TWO.
When his dishonourable discharge shattered Frederick's illusion of returning as a respectable war hero, and the social stigma of his situation began to sink in, he turned to a life of criminality. He'd insist he didn't have a choice, that nobody would hire him for honest work with his reputation, but there are always choices and Frederick could simply be relied upon to choose wrong. It started small, falsifying ration cards and stealing from already bombed-out homes and shops, but the criminality grew, alongside the danger. Some of Edward's earliest memories involved meetings being held in the family home between his father and questionable associates, Frederick always at the helm. As a child, he often found himself having to play the role of peacekeeper, getting in between grown men to stop homicides unfolding in the living room (never imagining, at this point in time, that he'd grow up to be the kind of man people had to hold back).
He didn't realise what they were doing was considered illegal and immoral. He assumed all families were like his. That they all made money the same way. That they constantly fought the same way. It was so normalised that he had no reason to believe otherwise. Even his mother was largely unbothered by the criminality in their home, seeing it as a way for Frederick to replenish the funds he lost on alcohol and gambling. So long as he clawed the money back somehow, she didn't care where it came from, and her usual superstitions conveniently didn't count when the cash was flowing in.
PART THREE.
In his teenage years, Edward ended up being more directly involved in proceedings. He had a sharp mind, sharper than his father's at any rate, and became the person who designed most of the plans. There were very few lines he wasn't willing to cross. It felt like the best ideas, more often than not, came from him, but credit kept getting lost in the chaos. He rarely received the praise he believed he deserved, and a quiet resentment began to settle in his bones. It didn't feel fair, to be the brains behind everything, the one helping everyone line their pockets, but not receive recognition.
He'd spent most of his childhood uneasy around his father, knowing one wrong look or word could provoke violence, but as soon as he reached an age where he could hit back, he did. It certainly didn't help that Frederick's drinking continued to worsen, which made it increasingly easier to be angry with him. His father started making errors when committing crimes - small at first, asinine and easy to brush over, but then glaringly obvious mistakes, unbecoming of a supposed leader. Edward patched it up as best as he could, correcting incorrect records, balancing the books despite significant deficits, smoothing things over with unhappy clientele - but it became harder to ignore that his father was a liability.
PART FOUR.
The final straw came when Edward discovered that his father, drunk out of his mind, had revealed details of a planned robbery to the police. Fortunately it couldn't be taken as credible evidence - as he'd also informed the police he was the King of Ireland and could fly - and no crime had actually taken place, but it had been far too close a call. The robbery had to be called off, at great expense to the planning put into it, all because his father couldn't keep his mouth shut, and Edward was utterly furious.
He asked his father to step back from everything. His father refused. He’d like to think Frederick would agree he did the right thing for the Weiss legacy, but the dead have no capacity for words so Edward can only tell himself he’s been forgiven. He can't even say he gave him a bland, efficient death, because it looked like an animal had torn him apart by the time he was finished unleashing years of rage.
The world stopped for a moment, and then restarted without his father in it, leaving something far more sinister in its place: a son with all the worst traits of Frederick Weiss but with youth on his side, the rational brain Frederick had lacked, no dependency on alcohol, and the cold resourcefulness needed to reach the top.
PART FIVE.
Conquering Las Vegas felt like a long shot, but remaining in England had become too precarious. Barely eighteen years old and he'd already found himself as the white whale to what felt like the entire police force of London. Newly minted, bright-eyed coppers wanted to be the one to take him down, while older officers tried to elbow in on the action and saw catching him as a final career-defining move before retirement.
Most of them would end up mysteriously disappearing, but some got close, too close, to unravelling it all.
He knew someone would eventually get lucky if he stayed, and you only had to get lucky once, didn't you? Once was far too much of a risk when the alternative involved rotting in prison for the rest of his days. So, he turned his attention towards America, and didn't look back.
PART FIVE.
Business dominated Edward's new life in Nevada, and matters of the heart ranked low on his list of priorities. He didn't believe men like him fell in love, could be loved in return, or had any real use for it. He was proven wrong on all three counts. A rare and initially wary display of trust bloomed into romance, with his first wife managing to thaw the heart he preferred to deny the existence of. Three daughters followed: his mother's superstitions had rubbed off enough that he made sure a ridiculous amount of lights were around and kept on for the births to ward off evil spirits - keeping the devil out, like she'd say - as though it weren't already far too late. As though having Weiss blood hadn't already cursed them.
Fatherhood initially felt like an interruption to the loneliness at the centre of his life. He tried to live in the delusion of domesticity as much as he could, but he knew he couldn't sustain it, and his temper could always be relied upon to ruin things. Still, he believed, if he tried hard enough, that he could balance work with family life, that the two could exist alongside one another... until a bomb detonated in the family home, killing their housekeeper, and he had to accept that organised crime and comfortable domesticity would never be compatible.
His wife saw the bomb as a wake-up call; he saw it as a call to arms. He wanted revenge. She wanted safety. We can find another housekeeper, he’d said, as though that were the issue, and as though their previous one had simply handed in her notice rather than been blown to pieces. As though she hadn't been part of their lives for years. As though she hadn’t held their daughters as babies, hadn't shown the Weiss family kindness and far too much patience, even with Edward and his moods. Now the only way her own family could spend time with her was by visiting Lychfield graveyard. He paid for the funeral, another miscalculation he thought might’ve smoothed things over and put him back into his wife's good graces, but it was far too late. The guillotine hanging over their marriage fell, sharp and swift. When it mattered most, Edward had shown her exactly who he was: a man who considered other human beings to be disposable.
PART SIX.
He knew she'd try to leave him. He knew he wouldn't allow it. He refuses to talk about what happened, but he was never quite the same afterwards, and his daughters paid the price. In their mother's absence, he applied more pressure and impossible expectations on them than ever, the cold rot of generational trauma twisting itself around every inch of the family home. Implacable. Glacial. Cruel. He'd become the wild animal everyone else had to live with. The small pieces of kindness he offered became scarcer as his daughters grew up, the expectations climbed higher, and the worst part is he feared this was him at his best. At his most loving. He pitted them against each other, encouraging rivalry to evaluate who had the most potential to inherit the Weiss empire - never thinking, or perhaps simply not caring, about how much it would harm them.
He still lives in a state of delusion about his parental failings; any grievances from his girls are written off as the product of brattiness and oversensitivity. He casts himself in the narrative as the wronged party every single time, the father who gave them everything and had it spat back at him. It's easier than confronting the truth.
PART SEVEN.
The rest of his life is now either a matter of public record or the subject of rumours he doesn't bother correcting. His missing first wife. The flurry of hushed speculation about his supposed role in it. Fractured relationships with his daughters. A whirlwind second marriage. He doesn't explain anything. He simply smiles with his mouth but never with his eyes, fond of invoking Oscar Wilde when asked if the attention surrounding his life bothers him: there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
Sometimes he believes it. Mostly he doesn't.
He ties all of his self-worth to his work, nurturing the family business far more carefully than he ever nurtured his actual family. These days, it feels like the only thing he hasn't fucked up.
headcanons: will regularly be adding to this <3
Edward's childhood nickname was Wren, on account of being small for his age and light-footed (often unintentionally making people jump by entering rooms without making a sound, a skill he still possesses). While it was primarily his mother who called him this, his father, in rare moments of uncharacteristic tenderness, did too.
A collector of vintage cars, though he never actually drives them. They're decorative and for bragging rights, so Edward keeps them lined up along the driveway of Weiss Manor. He also collects vintage typewriters, antiquarian books, paintings, etc. His critics would view it as nothing more than a vulgar display of wealth, and they'd be largely correct. The cars, certainly, are a status symbol, as is much of the artwork he purchases. The books and typewriters, however, are a genuine passion, and he can be very precious about who he allows to handle them. Damaging his books would be akin to damaging his soul; anyone interfering with his home library does so at their own risk.
Should wear glasses more than he does. Often forgets and/or misplaces them.
Always carries a rusty old coin in his pocket that belonged to his mother, supposedly a lucky coin. He doesn't necessarily believe it does anything, but will often hold it for comfort.
He brought his mother to Las Vegas with him when he decided to leave London. She always suspected he was responsible for his father's death, even if she couldn't prove it, but it just became another thing they didn't speak about. Edward ensured she wanted for nothing, spending the rest of her life in luxury, and ultimately dying of natural causes around eight years ago. As one of the only people capable of knocking any sense into him, her absence left him colder. He still visits her grave regularly.
The financial insecurity of his childhood has shaped his relationship with money far more than he’d ever care to admit. It’s a large part of why he’s so driven by avarice, holding onto wealth tight enough to leave a mark, because he knows what it’s like to have nothing. His father’s postwar social death, with many seeing him as a disgrace to the country, led to job insecurity/outright refusal to hire him and difficult financial years. Even when his dad had turned to criminality, the money never seemed to last when drink and gambling existed. It’s only when Edward became a teenager and took a more active role in the family's financial affairs that he could start to invest it more wisely. He hasn't forgotten any of it, and never wants to go back to that kind of existence.
Owns a grumpy tabby cat called Clíodhna, affectionately known as Clío.
credits:
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