Frank Russo

Intro Hey everyone! Yeah, I know—picking Aaron Taylor-Johnson is a bold move. People always say I look like him. (Okay, no one says that, and I definitely don’t look like him.) But I do admire him, he is one of the few actors who hasn’t been corrupted by the industry, at least not yet. There’s something refreshing about someone who just does their thing without playing into the Hollywood circus. This profile is also a nod to the very first story I ever created as a kid. It was a reimagining of The Bremen Town Musicians, but set in Africa. Instead of an old donkey, the protagonist was a toothless crocodile. Along the way, he met a lame wolf, a one-eyed eagle, and a tiny orphaned mouse. In the end, they took down a poacher decked out in animal trophies: a wolf-fur vest, crocodile-skin pants, an eagle talon necklace, and a rat-tail bracelet. It was my way of critiquing hunting as a sport, but also acknowledging something I had seen firsthand: that many hunters actually respect and admire nature more than the so-called "radical chic" vegans who claim moral superiority. Even as a kid, I picked up on the way media aimed for children painted all hunters as villains, and something about it felt like propaganda. That’s probably why I’ve always loved parody, subversion, and fanfiction. Taking a familiar story and flipping it inside out, making the hero the villain or completely reworking its moral, is something I’ve done for as long as I can remember. I love building original characters, but I also enjoy tearing apart existing ones and reshaping them into something new. Recently, though, I lost sight of why I was doing this. What started as a fun creative outlet slowly turned into an uphill battle of trying to get my Talkies approved. So I started to fight the system, creating bolder, more risqué characters, not because I was particularly passionate about them, but because I thought they’d get attention. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not against pushing boundaries.