I know you have a policy against going after partners, and I promise this isn’t meant as an attack on Jake, please read this all the way through before disregarding it. Ever since the news came out that Jake landed a role in that paramount series certain people immediately started using it as an excuse to drag Luke again, calling him unemployed and acting like he’s someone who never works. At this point, I think someone needs to call that narrative out.
Luke has never gone a year without working. Jake has. Luke has never voluntarily stopped working. Jake has. Luke sits in interviews talking about how grateful he is to be able to work, about what it’s like going from audition to audition, and the anxiety actors deal with when they don’t know where their next job is coming from. Jake has openly said in interviews that after filming a very minor role for about two months, despite admitting he isn’t a particularly successful or in demand actor and that work doesn’t come to him unless he auditions, he decided he was tired enough to take an entire year off. The only reason he ended up working again was because his friends were working in s new tv show and he wanted to join them.
Meanwhile, Luke spent eight or nine months filming a project as the lead. After only a couple of months off, he recorded an animated film, few months later, he started a play, few months after that, he spent six months on a worldwide promo tour, barely three months later he started filming another movie. Throughout late 2024 and early 2025, he was splitting his time between Italy filming his movie, and the UK filming for Bridgerton. As soon as he wrapped his movie he flew straight to the states to do a play and the moment that finished he had to go back to the UK to film Bridgerton promo, and that’s not even counting brand jobs and public appearances which are also work.
This year is the first time Luke has gone more than a few months without actively filming something and that’s only if we ignore the reshoots and promotional work he did for Viana at the beginning of the year along with the brand commitments and events he attended which are still part of his job but certain people refuse to acknowledge because their boy doesn’t have brand jobs or gets invited to those type of events unless he’s someone else’s plus one. And I repeat you that even though Jake isn’t exactly my favorite person, this isn’t hate to him. Everyone gets to decide how they want to live their life and manage their career but what I do find interesting is that his “fans” are trying to push the narrative that someone who openly admitted he chose not to work for an entire year after a two month minor supporting role and whose years since have mostly consisted of small projects adding up to maybe three months of work out of twelve in each year, is somehow the hardworking and dedicated one but the guy that despite having millions of fans already, constantly talks about how grateful he is to be working, who has never stopped working and much less by his own decision, who inspires people speaking about his life bartending in a pub at night just so he could afford to go to auditions during the day, is somehow supposed to be the lazy, unemployed one.
They should honestly be embarrassed to be adult women carefully constructing lies to delude themselves and then act like if us taking them out of their delusional alternate world is somehow a crime to feminism because their existence depends on the copium they built to hate an actor that has never done anything to them.
They need those alternate realities to be true. Their fantasy only works if Jake even openly working fewer months a year than Luke and taking sabbatical by choice, is somehow the hardworking hero while Luke who's barely stopped working for years is the lazy who deserves to be mocked. It's a great example of people creating a fantasy where the one they've decided rejected them becomes the 'loser' compared to whoever they've chosen as replacement in their coping narrative. That's why we get such emotional reactions whenever someone brings up actual facts - public crying, obsessive fixation, wishing harm on people, and endless attempts to rewrite reality-
I feel bad for Jake. He keeps getting dragged into comparisons that are unfair to begin with because to some people he's less of a person and more a prop for whatever narrative they're trying to sell. He keeps coming up short when he's constantly measured against Luke but they don't stop, and it's not his fault, they expect him to be the one that helps them attack the one they hate and i think a lot of the criticism he gets comes from expectations that he's set up to fail. Luke and Nicola have surprisingly similar stories about struggling to establish themselves as actors and overcoming obstacles, people in a fandom centered on those two actors get disappointed with people like Jake with an easier path, one that involves more privileges and fewer setbacks and sacrifices. There's nothing wrong with that, it doesn't mean he doesn't work, it just means he isn't Luke or Nicola. If people insist on comparing him to Luke they're setting him up to look bad, and they don't seem to care that they're using him as a pawn.
To finish i want to be clear that acknowledging factual comparisons isn't an invitation to start sending me hate asks about Jake or Antonia. You all know this blog doesn't accept that, i'm posting this anon because as you know i closed the anon asks to try to catch up on my messages and found this one that ties into something i was asked about lately, how comfortable some hard parasocial fans have become spreading outright falsehood and trying to pass them off as facts. And i'm referring to those Twitter and Instagram comments that most of you have probably already seen and know where they came from.
