Sweet Jesus. I know who she is. I know where I’ve seen this face before. I have seen Emily Bryant before. I’ve seen her in the photo I took from her apartment, the photo on her nightstand; the photo of the two women hiking high in the hills above Hollywood. I was right about one thing: Emily was in that photograph; she was just the one on the left instead of the one on the right.
Which means I never met Emily—it was Marla I met five days ago at that audition.
Ben’s words come back to me: Emily’s not what you think she is. You have no idea what you’re getting into here.
I shudder at the thought of what that could imply, for Emily Bryant and for me.
30
Who Are You?
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 15
All I have to go on is a first name and a face.
Back in the apartment, two hundred results come up for “Marla” when I search for her on IMDb. But I have time. I sift through the list, removing names that are variants on Marla. I ignore crew, non-actors, and those with credits pre-1990. There’s a chance she could be older than me but she can’t be more than thirty-five at the max.
I narrow down the list to twenty-one possibilities. I flick through their pages studying their photographs, but do not find her. Thirteen of the twenty-one do not have photographs on their pages. I’m sure she was careful to remove any photographic evidence, especially on such a mainstream public site as this.
One by one I search Google for each of the remaining names. Some names come up immediately, actresses who have worked enough to leave a trail of publicity or production stills in their wake. I study face after face. Some older, some younger, some blond, some of different ethnicities, some successful, some not. The volume of careers, or lack of them, when seen in quick succession takes its toll on my psyche. The flickering question of why I am here, so far from home, so far from the people who love me, quivers inside me but I push on.
After an hour I have three names left on my list. Marla Sinclair, Marla Kaplan, Marla Butler.
Sinclair only has two credits: Woman in Crowd, in a 2011 Christmas rom-com I’ve never heard of, and Communion Girl, in a 2001 slasher movie. Both parts are essentially extra roles so I’m guessing this isn’t Marla.
Marla Kaplan’s credits look more promising. Nine television credits in total, with depressingly two-dimensional character names like: Hot Friend, Vampire Girl, Mila’s au pair, Nude woman, and Girl.
Marla Butler’s credits look plausible too, though in a different way. Most of her credits come from the early 2000s and the character names, such as Young Iris, Young Cassandra, and Cute Girl, indicate she was a child actor then. She clocked up an impressive twenty-six credits before a hiatus in 2012. Then a fresh crop of short film and cameo roles since 2019 brings us up to date with a small role as a hotel receptionist in a recent Bond film. This Marla is slowly starting to get somewhere.
I scour the Internet for photographs of both Kaplan and Butler. I can find a few production stills from Butler’s younger roles but she’s a kid and it’s impossible to tell if it’s actually her. The little girl in these films runs from about five years old to ten.
I find a still of Kaplan from her Vampire movie, her hair highlighted, her features similar to those of other Marlas, but she’s only crouched in profile on the edges of the frame, not the focus of the photograph. It could be my Marla, though.
Either of these women could be.
A thought occurs to me. It might be worth searching Vimeo again, this time for one of the Marlas instead of for Emily.
I tap in Marla Butler’s most recent short film credit, but nothing comes up. I try another title. Again nothing.
Exasperated, I try simply typing in her name. A result appears. It’s a scene from a 2011 teen movie called She’s Got Class.
The names of two actresses in the scene are written in the video’s description box. Amy Rogers plays the lead and Marla Butler is her co-star. This could be her.