Jacobo Fe Gismera at the Downtown Studio

Some sitters arrive at the studio with a CV; Jacobo Fe Gismera arrived with a biography that reads like one of his own screenplays. A Spaniard in Los Angeles by way of UCLA, he was the youngest novelist in Spain to publish in the historical genre, putting out his peplum novel Perfectus Imperator at nineteen, the same age he began a modelling career that has since run to hundreds of publications across a dozen or more countries. His screenwriting — Ambergris, Halsted, Ace — has collected a small mountain of awards and fellowship recognitions, from the Academy Nicholl Fellowships to the Sundance Institute, and earned him an O-1 visa for extraordinary artistic ability. He writes period pieces built on exhaustive research: RAF pilots downed in the Sahara, nineteenth-century surgeons, Napoleonic campaigns. My sort of man, in other words.

Naturally, we leaned into it. For the first setup I put him in a battered leather trench, collar up, against a smoked grey canvas — equal parts Continental airman and matinee idol, which felt about right for a writer whose flagship script concerns a pilot crash-landing in 1942. The light was kept low and directional, letting the leather hold its texture and the curls catch the edge. There is a stillness to Jacobo in front of the camera that you cannot teach; years of fashion work will do that, but the gaze underneath is the writer's — watchful, slightly amused, taking notes.

For the closing frames we stripped it all back. Black crew neck, near-black ground, a single source raking across the face. It is the setup I return to again and again because it leaves the sitter nowhere to hide, and the best ones don't want to. Jacobo held it without flinching. Somewhere between Caravaggio's young men and a Cassavetes still, and I'll take that.

A pleasure of a session, and proof once more that the most interesting faces in this town often belong to the people writing the films rather than starring in them — though I suspect Jacobo intends to do both.