❛ LITTLE LORD.

◜     ┈     🎬      :    HISTORY.

born in norway, but moved around a whole lot growing up, since both his parents were  medieval literature professors & researchers. (yes, he is named after that tristan). the longest amount of his formative years was spent in canada, which is why his double languages are english and internet dudebro slang.

despite having graduated highschool in montreal, he absolutely can’t hack it at french. his accent remains a weird mix of two different continents and too many european movies watched too soon. he does remember norwegian, but he doesn’t speak it on the regular. at least not unless some reporter on the red carpet asks him to say something for 0.2 seconds of cultural performance.

has an overall stable but distant relationship with his parents. bit of an intellectual complex as he was never well-read or attentive enough to hold up his end of dinner table conversations. has two brothers who are way older and academically recognized since undergrad, so that doesn’t help either. iverson family festivities are an unending string of highbrow references and obscure easter egg hunts. 

tristan was only ever tangentially interested in literature and fine arts. he had a good eye for framing shots & coordinating visuals, but he never applied it to anything. he also rarely stuck to the writing he started, both scrips and novellas, despite (or perhaps because of?) being surrounded by it throughout his childhood.

basically, if something didn’t instantly come to him and granted him laurels, he dropped it. which is, you know, a textbook case of younger sibling/brat diagnosis. as a consequence, he didn’t really excel at anything throughout highschool, and the few things he did do well he mostly didn’t pursue out of spite. #useless boy summer.

when he went on with acting, it was entirely on a whim, after dropping out of two majors - one in montreal at mcgill (journalism), the other in scotland (theatre production & directing). he got scouted by several agencies for small time gigs and after the sixth time this happened, he realized a couple of things. one, his looks are a pretty solid bargaining chip, and two, he could potentially actually be good at this with zero effort.

◜     ┈     🎬      :    PRESENT .

narrator voice. can you guess what happened next? being taken seriously as an actor required more than net minimum effort. he had no practical training, so there were a bunch of classes he had to take, on top of private sessions with dialect coaches, movement & fighting action coaches, stunt coordinators & so on.

soon after he got listed he started billing high-profile movies. superheroes, gladiators, historically inaccurate period romances and tearjerker war propaganda, you name it.

soon after that, there was no need to put in an effort anymore. the industry functioned on inertia. his genetics assured his visibility for him, and where they failed, his PR teams picked up the flag. a scandal, a commercial, a staged event - there were a lot of opportunities to get him back in the public eye, and none of them had to do with his work. his career was picking up, so quickly he just had to let himself be towed along.

the good part was that he finally had a topic to bring to the infamous dinner table contests. the bad part was that his career was utterly shit. the movies he got cast in were not just mediocre or over-produced, but heaped with cliches the industry wouldn’t have stomached even in the 80′s. it.... wasn’t great.

his portfolio was so sub-par that any old friend or family member who deigned to watch them received like, actual vouchers for their effort.

he saw himself as talented, but with this source material & medium, there was no way to prove it. besides, they were so well paying, even a chronic dropout like him couldn’t just bail from the deal on the table. contract followed contract, and soon he was approaching 30 and was still being recognized as that superman guy.

when the offer from final productions came, he saw it as a chance fell from the sky. that’s a pretty big evaluation, considering this is a person for whom chances literally fell from the sky and smack into his lap on the daily, ever since childhood.

even though red line is not that different from the subsidiaries that signed him in canada and the states, that’s on paper. in practice, he heard a lot of hush-hush, under-wraps things about the flexibility between different studios, the quick promotions and unexplored potential for mobility in the ranks. it’s all very new, and infinitely challenging. this might just be his chance to be remembered as something other than a one-time prodigy, or a poster child for consumerism’s failure to encourage talent. 

◜     ┈     🎬      :    PLOT POINTS .

these are a work in construction as i’ve yet to plot with anyone and my brain is still recovering from grad school ( eugh. academia is a scam ) but, here goes !

someone he pretended to date for the cameras a while back? obviously it’d have to be a mutually beneficial agreement but whether your muse resented how they went about it or not is up for plotting ! it’s also up for us to plot how it ended: amicably? fake scandal? actual genuine scandal they still cringe to think about? 

a person he ACTUALLY dated but for various reasons ( INFIDELITY TW ) such as another relationship/marriage or a conflict of business interests prevented him from going public about. whether it ended in flames or not is UTP.

someone the media portrayed him as having ‘beef’ with, despite them knowing little about one another, at most having just competed for a similar role or two. 

someone he competed it for a long time - could be on going, could be in the past !

someone he had to mentor & teach the ropes during a demanding production (superhero franchise or 3-hour long war movie). could’ve stayed in contact or developed into more. your muse could be grateful, awkward, any number of things upon meeting him again. bonus cringe points if he doesn’t remember them lmao...

someone that mentored him in the past, as he largely had no fucking clue what he was doing when he made his break in the industry at 21.

former agent? current agent? someone structure this man’s life, fr.

someone on his PR team ! or someone that wanted to collaborate with him/work under his team, but didn’t get a chance to in the past.

someone that rejected his auditions/pitch for a movie/pitch for a show.

former fan / journalist / blogger that had to do a whole reportage on him and spend a lot of time with (think: road movie type documentary, following him around for a biopic etc).

acting classes colleagues. early days colleagues for shows that never got past the pilot. the mortifying ordeal of meeting someone that saw you at your worst. potential for a secret shared between them, that either made or broke their friendship.

someone he planned an indie movie/documentary with but never got around to releasing because he got yeeted on the fast-track to ✨ Famous. this could be the potential for either jealousy or disdain because what is tristan if not a sellout.

someone he always admired but never could get on the phone and agree to meet him for a pitch (screenwriter, director, composer, indie producer etc.). the studios he worked with were renowned for being union-busting mass-produced giants, and they always went for the cheapest options rather than taking the time to value artists. which means that the more a creator respected themselves and the complexity of cinema as an art form, the less they wanted anything to do with him lmao. basically, this connection is the one that kept getting away, but professionally. this parallel would also work as a foil since tristan’s BIGGEST complex, in massive freudian neon signs, is not being intelligent enough and wasting his talent. 🤠😳👉👈