Let's face it lads, we all know a guy like Rob Devlin. He's the type of guy who wakes up in the morning and without a hair out of place. The type of guy who makes getting a girls phone number look as routine as an England World Cup exit.The type of guy you'd love to bloody hate if he wasn't so frickin' cool!
Rob is not only Dan's best friend, he is the Vinny Chase (from
Entourage) to his group of friends. He's the grenade they throw into enemy lines (or groups of girls) and once the explosion goes off, they are there to feed on the scraps left behind.
Yep, there is no denying that a guy like Rob is a useful weapon to have at your disposal. Once you finally accept that your role within the friendship is to sneak in and chat up the friend of the girl that happens to take Rob's eye. The best you can hope for in that situation is that you don't come up against that classic hot chick/ugly chick combo (the one where good looking girls pair themselves off with facially challenged friends in order to enhance their own looks), because we don't mind playing the wing-man to our good-looking pal but not at the expense of constantly being paired off with a girl who looks like Luis Suarez with long hair.
So the type of actor I'd like to play Rob in the make-believe-world of
The Drought being made into a movie would clearly need to have the looks and charisma, but he'd need to mix it with a little bit of lad arrogance. In other words, he needs to be able to carry himself as one of the chaps.
It took me a while to think of someone who would do the part justice. For a while I kept coming back to Rob Pattinson, but for whatever reason he didn't quite feel right. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that all I could think of was
Twilight and then I'd stab myself in the eye with a dull butterfly knife.
So I went back to square one and Googled
young male actors.And then something happened that I wasn't expecting.
My wife checked my search history, looked at me funny, broke down in tears and through her sobs asked me why I had hidden my gay tendencies from her for all these years. It was an awkward moment, which didn't exactly get any better when I explained I was searching for actors to play a character in a film that will be never be made things were all good in the world again. The tears stopped but the funny looks didn't. Oh well, one out of two ain't bad.
After 10 minutes or so of searching I found my Rob in
Noah actor Douglas Booth. At first glance he looked the part and certainly matched the appearance that I had of Rob in mind and I thought he'd pair off nicely with
Alex Carter as Dan. But what about his personality? Did that match?
How the hell do I know if the personality matched?! I don't know the guy and to be honest, this whole search for the perfect actor to play Rob had already resulted in my wife going from thinking I am gay to thinking I'm just an oddball spending too much time on pointless activities. As far as I'm concerned, this task hasn't exactly done me any favours so I'm going to quit while I'm ahead and go with Douglas Booth. Don't let me down sunshine!
