I like the idea of Kevin’s public persona freaking out the Foxes. Not only in the sense that it’s weird to see Kevin being so polite and proper. But that there’s something eerie about it all that puts them on edge.
Kevin doesn’t just put on a smile and call it a day no his entire demeanour shifts.
Everything from Kevin’s posture to the way he breathes completely changes. The smile on his face looks more natural than his actual smile. They watch as the panic leaves his body and morphs into this false sense of ease as if he were drunk.
When Kevin’s in front of the cameras his friends come face to face with the broken boy Tetsuju created. A picture perfect doll built to smile and please. He shakes hands and plays along when people twice his age joke about what they’d do if they got him alone.
Every move Kevin makes on stage is one someone else decided for him and drilled into his brain. It’s so easy to lose the progress he’s made and fall back into the familiarity of being a puppet and submit to the programming that was beaten into him.
Kevin can’t mess up not even a little because if he reveals that beneath it all he’s a living breathing person well he’s not the only one who’ll be paying for it. He hugs the man that was once his brother as if he never broke him. Both of them talk and laugh and none of it’s real but it has to look at it.
He sits beside Neil once again but the Kevin he knows is so far removed from this one that he may as well have never been there at all.