"Raph?"
"I'll take it."
Ari paused, clearly not expecting him to agree so quickly.
"Do you understand what this actually means? For three years, you can't touch any competing brands. Underwear, denim—you are entirely locked in."
"I know."
"Do you know what a Calvin Klein underwear shoot entails? It's a completely closed set. Just you, the photographer, and a stylist. You're going to have hundreds of millions of people staring at your abs and your V-line—"
"I know."
Ari fell silent.
After a long moment, he sighed, dropping the exaggerated, serious agent persona.
"As long as you know what you're signing up for."
He paused.
"Philip told me to pass on a message. He said you earned this, and you shouldn't feel embarrassed about it."
Raphael didn't reply.
He was thinking that compared to his absolutely massive cosmic debt, stripping down to his boxers for a photoshoot was nothing. For the right price, he'd walk through hell itself.
As it stood, fifteen and a half million dollars—from Star Wars, the Dior sunglasses, and now the CK campaigns—was about to hit his bank account.
But it still wasn't enough. Not even close.
"Raph?" Ari's voice broke through his thoughts. "What time is it over there?"
Raphael looked up. Outside the window, the Sydney winter night had already swallowed the sky.
"Almost six."
"Then go eat dinner. Stop living off coffee."
"...Got it."
"Hanging up."
The line went dead.
Raphael tossed his phone into his bag and picked up the practice lightsaber resting on his knees. The aluminum hilt was warm from the sweat of his palms; it wasn't cold anymore.
He hit the ignition switch.
The blue blade flared to life in the dark room, casting a harsh glow across his face.
---
Early August. The third week of principal photography.
George Lucas sat behind the monitors, his hands steepled under his chin, staring blankly at the playback.
Scene 17. Take 4.
On screen, Natalie Portman's Padmé stood by the artificial lakeside retreat of Naboo. Raphael's Anakin stood exactly three paces away from her.
The lighting was flawless. The wardrobe and makeup were perfect. Every single line of dialogue was delivered exactly as written.
There was only one problem.
There was zero spark.
It wasn't Natalie's fault. She perfectly captured Padmé's regal grace, her restraint, and the quiet agony of being deeply moved but terrified to respond.
And it wasn't Raphael's fault. He nailed Anakin's burning intensity, his clumsy desperation, and his reckless devotion.
The problem was that they were just acting at each other.
There was no underlying current between them. They generated absolutely none of the gravitational pull required to make an audience believe these two people were hopelessly destined to be together.
Lucas pulled his headphones off and rubbed his temples.
"Cut! Take fifteen, everyone."
Natalie immediately stepped off the mark, retreating to the sidelines as an assistant handed her a water bottle and held up a parasol. She took the water but didn't drink right away; she just stared down at her script, silently mouthing the lines for the next setup.
Raphael walked straight over to the combat training area—the crew always kept a practice lightsaber waiting for him. During breaks, he never made small talk. He just swung the sword in total silence, over and over again.
The two leads had practically zero interaction on set.
It wasn't a cold war. They hadn't fought.
They just... didn't interact.
Watching this play out, Lucas let out a silent sigh.
"Worried about the chemistry?" producer Rick McCallum asked, stepping up behind him.
"Shouldn't I be?" Lucas didn't look back. "They're doing it perfectly, and it's still completely wrong."
"Natalie's a Harvard student," McCallum offered. "Her process is highly intellectual. She needs to fully dissect a scene before she emotionally commits. Raphael is a rookie. Maybe he just hasn't figured out how to build a connection with his scene partner yet."
"It's not that he hasn't figured it out." Lucas shook his head. "It's that he doesn't care."
"Doesn't care?"
"Are you blind, Rick?" Lucas finally turned around. "The kid has absolutely zero interest in her."
McCallum blinked. "...You mean, you want him to try and—"
"I don't mean they need to date!" Lucas cut him off, his tone sharp with frustration. "I mean I need a spark! Even a tiny one! I need him to look at her for one second longer than necessary when the cameras aren't rolling. I need an unspoken look during rehearsals. I'm getting nothing! He looks at her like she's a desk lamp—clicks her on when they call action, clicks her off when they call cut."
McCallum didn't know what to say to that.
Lucas stood up, walked over to the edge of the soundstage, and lit a cigarette.
He rarely smoked, reserving the habit only for moments of extreme, migraine-inducing stress.
"He's playing Anakin flawlessly," Lucas said, exhaling a thin cloud of smoke. "Anakin's approach to Padmé is exactly like that—too aggressive, all-in, burning the boats behind him. But outside the scene? How does he treat Natalie? Polite. Cordial. Miles of professional distance. He compartmentalizes it too cleanly."
"Doesn't that just mean he's a great actor?"
"It means it's bullshit!" Lucas swore, a rare occurrence. "It's a romance! The audience needs to see the bleeding edges of that tension when the cameras stop rolling! Do you think Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford had sparks in the original movie just because they were acting? No! They had sparks because they drove each other completely insane!"
McCallum wisely kept his mouth shut.
"Forget it," Lucas grumbled, crushing the cigarette out. "Let them figure it out on their own. We still have time."
He turned and walked back to the monitors.
Neither man noticed that across the set, under the shade of a parasol, Natalie Portman had just slowly turned a page in her script.
She had also just mentally filed away every single word of their conversation.
---
August 17.
Winter in Sydney was drawing to a close, but the Fox soundstages were still damp and freezing.
Today, the crew had relocated to a private, sprawling estate in the northern suburbs of the city to shoot some wide exterior shots for Naboo.
Raphael wrapped for the day at 4:00 PM.
He stripped out of his heavy Jedi robes, threw on his own gray hoodie, and found a quiet corner on the veranda outside the main estate house.
He closed his eyes and dropped into his daily meditation.
His Force perception rippled outward like a stone dropped in a pond. Thirty feet. A hundred and fifty feet. Three hundred feet.
He could sense the lighting crew tweaking heavy rigs on the western lawn. He could feel the makeup artists touching up extras in the converted stables on the east side. Inside the main house, he sensed Rick McCallum arguing with a local Australian producer over tomorrow's call sheet.
Then, he sensed something else.
It wasn't human.
Cold. Slender. Sluggishly moving through the grass near the row of temporary wooden cabins designated for the cast.
Raphael opened his eyes.
He stood up and broke into a sprint.
---
Natalie Portman woke up because it was too warm.
The space heater in her cabin was blasting, and the sheer exhaustion of the afternoon shoot had pulled her into a deep, heavy sleep.
She didn't know how long she'd been out, only that the sunlight bleeding through the window had turned a deep, bruised orange.
She shifted her ankle slightly, preparing to sit up.
Then, she froze.
There was something on her ankle.
It was freezing cold, incredibly smooth, and heavily muscled. It was slowly, tentatively coiling its way up her calf.
Natalie stopped breathing for three full seconds.
She wasn't the type of girl to scream. She had been working in the industry since she was ten, and she was a sophomore at Harvard. She knew how to compartmentalize panic.
She slowly, agonizingly slowly, lowered her eyes.
A snake.
It was easily six feet long, as thick as a teenager's wrist. Its grayish-brown scales caught the dim, dying sunlight, giving off a dull, menacing sheen.
It had already wrapped itself around her calf and was steadily creeping toward her knee.
Natalie instantly recognized the species from a safety briefing they'd been given on day one.
An Eastern Brown Snake.
Highly aggressive. Unbelievably fast. Lethally venomous.
Her heart started hammering against her ribs, her breathing turning shallow and erratic.
Her brain was spinning out of control—If I scream, will it strike? If I slowly pull my leg away, will it coil tighter? Before she could process her next move, the cabin door swung open.
Light flooded the room, framing a silhouette in the doorway.
It wasn't a PA. It wasn't her assistant.
It was Raphael.
He stood in the doorway, the sunset behind him casting his features in total shadow.
Natalie couldn't see his face, but she saw him take one deliberate step into the room.
"Don't move," he whispered. His voice was incredibly soft, like he was gentling a spooked horse.
Oddly enough, the second she heard those words, the paralyzing tension in her muscles began to ease.
Raphael didn't look at the snake.
He looked directly into her eyes.
Then, he extended his hand. He didn't reach for the snake. He didn't try to shield her.
He just held his hand out, palm facing down, fingers slightly splayed.
Nothing happened.
There was no sound, no sudden movement, no visible shift in the air whatsoever.
But the snake stopped dead.
It remained coiled around her leg, but it looked as though someone had hit a pause button on reality.
Then, very slowly, the massive snake uncoiled itself. It slid off her leg, slithered down the side of the cot, and slipped through a crack in the floorboards, vanishing entirely into the dark foundation of the cabin.
The entire encounter lasted roughly fifteen seconds.
Natalie sat perfectly still.
She didn't ask, How did you do that? She didn't ask, Why did it leave? She didn't ask a single question a normal person would ask in that scenario.
She just sat there, her head tilted up, staring at the boy standing in the backlit doorway.
The dying light finally shifted over his shoulder, pulling his face out of the shadows.
Natalie looked at his eyes.
They weren't the eyes of a nineteen-year-old kid.
They were the eyes of a man who had stared into the eternal city lights of Coruscant. They were the eyes of someone who had absorbed the millennia-old echoes of the Jedi Temple. They were eyes carrying the crushing weight of a destiny caught in the cracks between dreams and reality.
They were the eyes of someone who had just stared down a lethal apex predator as if he were taking out the trash.
She had never seen eyes like that in her entire life.
Raphael lowered his gaze, confirming the snake was completely gone.
"Are you okay?"
"I..." Natalie started, realizing her voice sounded like coarse sandpaper. "You—"
She couldn't finish the sentence.
Not because she was terrified. Not because of the adrenaline crash.
It was because, in that specific moment, it hit her with staggering clarity: For the last three weeks, I haven't understood a single thing about Raphael Lee. "Thank you," she finally managed to say.
Raphael gave a short nod, took a step back, and grabbed the door handle.
"Wait!" Natalie blurted out.
Raphael stopped and looked at her.
She opened her mouth, but she had absolutely no idea what to say.
Her script was filled with hundreds of lines Padmé was supposed to say to Anakin, but she didn't have a single line prepared for whoever she was looking at right now.
Finally, she settled for the only thing that made sense. "Don't tell anyone about this."
Raphael looked at her. There was no curiosity in his gaze, no teasing smirk.
"Okay."
He turned and walked back out into the twilight.
Inside the cabin, Natalie Portman sat alone in the quiet. The phantom sensation of the snake's freezing scales still lingered on her skin.
But what lingered even more clearly was a different kind of intensity—the look in the eyes of the boy standing in the backlit doorway fifteen seconds ago.