my headcanon for trina vega, after high school. this is a fix-it.
trina dates sinjin for a while, and while the relationship doesn’t make it past her freshman year of college, it drastically improves how she perceives and interacts with dating and her own self-image. it’s also probably good for sinjin but that’s a different story.
trina learns that simply being popular doesn’t guarantee happiness, and that she can get much better results in life by being just slightly respectful to people. she goes to southern california college of acting (scca) and majors in performance, but to fill out her courseload she takes persuasive speech classes, participates in debate, and even takes a couple economics classes.
she gets involved with a group of students who run an underground theater troupe (jokingly named troupe beverly hills); at first because they always cast her but eventually she learns to love every part of their bizarre, experimental, and no-budget performances. she actually tells someone in the troupe about a casting call for a pilot that she thinks really suits him. he gets the part, and the pilot is picked up, and he jokingly refers to trina as his agent.
it turns out that being acknowledged in this way makes trina feel better than being cast as lead ever did, and she starts finding ideal castings for all the members of her college troupe. at some point, most of the original members of troupe beverly hills have left the troupe, happily employed in roles that trina found for them.
one of trina’s former troupe-mates comes to her, at the end of her senior year of college, and asks if she knows of any available roles? the role trina had found for her has ended and she wants trina to be her agent, officially and for money. trina is flabbergasted and of course she agrees to help. she uses her commission to rent a little office space, and oops, she’s become a real hollywood agent.
it turns out that she was BORN for this. not only does she have a knack for finding the perfect role for any given actor, she’s bossy and annoying and pushy, so her clients actually GET every audition that she picks for them. she becomes a popular agent very quickly.
for the first few years, trina will sign anyone who comes to her, but eventually she has more clients than she can adequately represent, so she learns to become choosy with her clients. she attends every opening, show, improv, and high school musical, and develops a canny knack of finding the under-cast or poorly-utilized thespians, who she will approach with the offer of clientage. by the time she is 30, she’s known as the best agent in hollywood, (and she’s not unknown on broadway!) while having absolutely no application process. she chooses you, or she doesn’t, and if you don’t accept her offer, you’ll never live that down.
sometimes actors complain about trina’s choice of part for them; it’s a small part, it’s not the type of thing they want to do, etc., but trina does not back down from her clients, either, and they either take the role she suggests, or they find a new agent. only a few ever fire trina, but they wash out fast, while an oscar and a tony for two bit parts that trina forced clients into soon stop any grumbling on that subject.
so trina’s professional life is an amazing success. but what about her personal life? let’s be real here, trina is gorgeous, successful, and rich. she can literally pick and choose lovers. it turns out she doesn’t really want one. occasionally she’ll hook up with some hot up-and-comer (represented by someone else of course) but those flings rarely last more than a month and she has no patience for anything that distracts her from her work. she’s arguably the best agent in the world, and her career makes her happy, and hooking up with hot people of every gender when she feels the need is plenty for her.
she has an amazing full-wall tank of tropical fish in her office, and while most people assume she hires someone to maintain it, it’s actually her number one hobby. it turns out the pooka fish also satisfied some empty space in her emotional landscape, and now she spends hours carefully feeding, caring for, and even training her fish. she never shares her hobby with anyone, and her will sets up an endowment to pay for the monterey bay aquarium to care for them after her death.
she directs the rest of her fortune to be used to set up a scholarship that finds talented kids from all over the world and pays for them to go to scca, where troupe beverly hills has become a fixture of the acting scene. it remains a major locus of experimental theater. trina goes down in hollywood history as one of the greats, and dies happy, successful, and a role-model for people everywhere.
(PS) she absolutely trains up a protege in her techniques for finding exactly the right role for any performer, and co-writes a book about it, founding the ‘vega school’ of artist representation. over a generation, this DEMOLISHES the nepotistic model of hollywood casting, and leads to a new film renaissance.
