hey look ma, I made it

Who's Poppy? Can I see a picture of her in her sweater or is she, like, not cute?

Poppy is my dog, she is an absolute angel, and you can absolutely see a photo of her in her sweater, here.

You have your tree up before thanksgiving? Wow thats dedication. Ours always go up straight after thanksgiving. We always have the best little nativity figures set up.

I guess I never really give thanksgiving a lot of thought? I didn't live in the States until I was like 12/13 so it just doesn't really fall on my radar. Oh cute, I love looking at the elaborate nativity scenes people set up

BRODY WESTON

☆ FULL NAME: Brody Elias Weston ☆ GENDER: Cisman ☆ PRONOUNS: He/Him ☆ AGE: 34 (June 10th, 1990) ☆ TYPE: Full sibling; twin ☆ HOMETOWN: Bellevue Hill, New South Wales, Australia ☆ JOB: Professor of Acting at PSU; Actor ☆ SCHOOL: Other ☆ SEXUALITY: Homosexual (semi-closeted) ☆ FACECLAIM: Jonathan Bailey

ABOUT BRODY

Spending his early years overseas, Brody was initially a rather shy kid. Moving around a lot the way they did meant he found it difficult to make friends for very long, but he did have his twin and that was alright by him. He always greatly admired his mom for how selfless she was, and how much she did for people she didn’t even know, but sometimes he wished they could just stay put in one place for a change. When they settled in the States, that was when Brody really came out of his shell, started to make friends outside of his siblings, and really blossomed.

Brody loved to watch his father at work wherever possible, often following him around sets or watching from backstage in awe of everything going on around him. He and Beth had been actors together as babies, and honestly it was perhaps the most fun he’d ever had doing anything in his life. Watching his dad just solidified what he already knew: Brody wanted to be an actor. No, more than that, Brody needed to be an actor. This was what he was always meant to do.

Having Beth at his side certainly helped with that, especially when it came to dominating the middle school theatre scene. She was cut throat and determined to get them the best roles, and he was more than happy to be the same, even if that meant them playing love interests. This was theatre after all, and as they had often told their drama teachers “who has better chemistry than Gemini twins?”. While his sister excelled at dance, Brody excelled at singing, often joking with her that maybe they should stick together forever and make one awesome triple threat actor. Still, whether it was Shakespeare, contemporary theatre, or a musical, Brody wanted to be a part of it and threw himself into extra lessons for dance, acting and singing to make sure that he could be the very best at everything that could be thrown his way.

When it came time for college, Brody knew he had some tough decisions to make. He adored his sister and knew she was headed for PSU, which was a great university, but he knew that all the greats went to prestigious theatre schools, and that meant he’d have to be apart from her for the first time in his life. With a successful audition came acceptance to The Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute, and Brody knew he couldn’t turn that down. It was time to prove himself as an actor in his own right, not as the other half of the Weston Twins, not as the son of Jude Weston, but as Brody Weston, highly skilled and in demand actor, man of many talents.

That meant striking out on his own as much as he could, asking his parents to let him pay his own way through college and make sure that his classmates couldn’t say that he was only here by virtue of their money and sway, but that presented a whole host of complicated problems for him. It was disconcerting being on his own for the first time, and living in New York was not cheap, not to mention the tuition fees, and the travelling for auditions, and the need to pay bills and buy food. Brody needed a job, he wasn’t about to go back on his word to do this by himself, but he needed way more money than working as a server or in retail was going to get him if he wanted to stay at LSTFI.

He isn’t proud of what happened next, a decision that he hasn’t even told Beth about, but Brody put his good looks and natural charm to use as an escort. He thought that it was a modelling gig at first (that is what was advertised after all) but it turned out to be a front for the high-end escort service. Brody had the chance to back out, and he almost did but in the end he couldn’t afford not to take that kind of pay right now. Brody felt… dirty almost, sex became a very transactional thing, but he was in demand and that paved his way through college. He’d intended to give it up once he graduated, but it turned out that not leveraging his family name meant that the roles were not pouring in the way he wanted, and if he wanted to live somewhere that wasn’t an underpass, that meant keeping up the escorting gig.

It also meant getting creative with his lies, telling his friends and family that he was getting more gigs than he was, that they were paying better than they were, anything to make sure that no-one found out what he was really doing to make money. He hated leading a double life, hated lying to his family, and honestly? He was starting to hate sex. It was all just mechanical to him, something he had to do in order to get paid, never convinced that anyone was actually attracted to him, they simply just didn’t want to be lonely. While Brody’s clients had been exclusively women up until this point, he got wind of a man that had requested his services, offering twice his normal rate. He was in deep at this point, with credit card debt and acting classes to pay off, auditions in LA and Toronto to get to as he widened his search for a role, and so he figured, why not? It was all just transactional after all.

Except, his appointment with Milo was different. I started in the way he treated him, not as an object, as something to be purchased, but as a human being that had his own thoughts, desires and needs. He had kissed him softly, gently removed his clothes, but before that he had sat down, had talked to him, asked him about his life. If it hadn’t been for the envelope of cash discreetly slid into his coat pocket when Milo had taken it from him on his arrival, Brody might have called it the best date of his life. He wasn’t ready to accept the truth yet, instead insisting to himself that it was simply just because he had felt human for a change, but it had left him with a lot of questions. Which was why a chance meeting with a stage legend at a bar one night became one of the most pivotal moments in his young life.

Cassandra July was a tour de force of the stage that Brody had admired for a long time (as an actress rather than a human being though admittedly, her very public breakdown was hardly a secret), so when she had approached him at a bar and started a conversation, he had been a little starstruck. That, added to the fact he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had sex just because rather than for money, and the alcohol in his system, and Brody made a less than stellar decision to let her take him home. To be fair, he was celebrating after all, he’d landed a role on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, recurring for at least five episodes, so he was entitled to have a little fun.

Fun it was not though, not in the way that Brody was excepting anyway. Cassandra was hot, no denying that, but even though there was not a dollar in sight, their hookup still felt mechanical. He knew that night, as he lay next to Cassandra, that the reason things with Milo had felt so different was because he was gay. It was something of an earth altering realisation for him, but nothing he supposed he couldn’t handle. After all, it wasn’t like he would be the first actor in the world to be gay. But what he had seen as a simple one-night stand, something that would eventually fade into obscurity, turned into the beginning of a nightmare. The minute he stepped out of Cassandra July’s doors, Brody was hounded by paparazzi, all of them ready to get the scoop on her latest conquest, on the twenty something slinking his way out of her house to make the walk of shame home.

For months, Brody couldn’t go anywhere without being flocked by the press, his face and name were splashed across the tabloids, the little reputation he’d managed to build for himself dragged through the mud. To make matters worse, his new acting gig had been retracted due to all negative attention on him and the potential safety risk that came with him being hounded all the time. Try as he might, Brody couldn’t land another audition nevermind another acting job, and all the attention meant that the escort agency also dropped him without warning, citing the “need for discretion” for their clients, and he was now without every avenue he had for making money.

So Brody, with his head hung and his tail between his legs, did the thing he vowed he wouldn’t do and went back to his parents to help him stand on his own two feet. New York was tainted now, so he moved back home to LA, sinking into a deep depression as it seemed that his dreams, his great passion, were dashed. He withdrew into himself a lot for the next couple of years, still fighting for auditions and roles, but without the same passion and zeal he once possessed. Eventually, small roles filtered through, and Brody found a purpose again. He knew that the only reason he was getting these offers was because his last name carried weight in these circles, and as much as he resented it, the alternative was to keep sitting on the sofa of his parent’s house and wasting away his days playing videogames.

Still, if roles were offered that felt too good to be true or if they were offered without an audition, Brody turned them down. Maybe his pride got in his way, maybe now wasn’t the time to be saying no to roles, maybe he could prove that he was a great actor in his own right while still taking these roles, but still he couldn’t just go along with it like it didn’t bother him to not be respected in his own right. That got him a label as a “diva”, one that was picky about his roles and turned down perfectly good roles because of his ego, and it didn’t do his struggling career any favours.

Brody feels like he doesn’t know himself anymore. The Brody that everyone else sees isn’t the one that he knows himself to be, and maybe that’s why he never publicly came out. His family and his closest friends know that he’s gay, but the general public don’t, he’s seen the kind of damage the tabloids can do, experienced the repercussions firsthand, and with his career just recovering it seemed safer to put up a front than be his authentic self, hence the long, long line of women that he’s “dating”. Let them think he’s a playboy, a serial dater, there were plenty of men in Hollywood like that, it was better than them smearing him all over the tabloids for being himself.

Still, his career as an actor is struggling, and for now, Brody has taken a teaching job at PSU so that he can move out of his parent’s house again, putting all his surplus of skill into teaching the next generation of actors, and imparting the odd pearl of wisdom about keeping their names out of the press for the sakes of their careers. He dates men behind closed doors, but not a single one of them has ever stuck around for very long, and honestly he can’t even blame them. He feels like a coward and a fraud, but he just doesn’t trust that he can be himself and still achieve the dreams he was worked so hard for.

FAMILY BACKGROUND