Actors sometimes don’t know what they’re doing posing for pictures together. There they are, a part of a cast, at some event, posing with their cast mates, all to do their bit to promote their project and get folks excited about seeing it and them on the screen. Little do they realize, one actor posing with another actor, even on opposite ends of the pose, even when the characters those actors play in that particular project don’t have any time together on screen or intersect at all really in that project, can spark all sorts of ideas in those of us on the other side of the fourth wall.
Such a thing happened to this viewer upon seeing Damian on one end and Costa Ronin on the other in a promo shot from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. You see, Costa Ronin as Yevgeny Gromov in Homeland, Season 7, created the worst hell imaginable for Carrie Mathison. The same Carrie Mathison who Damian Lewis as Nicholas Brody had loved so untenably in Seasons 1 – 3 of Homeland. Brody, Carrie’s one true love and the father of her child, and Gromov, her most recent and most violent nemesis on stage together? How could such a juxtaposition not light a match on the imagination? A fanfic must be written! And it was. Here’s Chapter One of a multi-chapter treatment, with a chapter posted every Friday till it’s done. A window into what it might have looked like had Brody and Gromov intersected in Homeland and Brody and Carrie had another turn.
