Irene de Vries

Growing up as a child model and actor, Irene always felt like she was born and built for the spotlight: she rarely had a moment's rest when she was a child, constantly being hustled from photoshoots, makeup trailers, film sets, school, and so on. While her parents tried their best to stay in Irene's life, she established a certain guarded distance from them; their excitement over her achievements often felt fake or performative, no matter how genuine they were trying to be. It was difficult for her to make friends, given both her popularity and the fact that she felt decidedly disconnected from most of her peers. None of them quite understood the world of entertainment the way that she did -- and from what she saw, she wanted to escape as quickly as she possibly could.

The pressure that she frequently faced from being recognized on the street (or even from seeing herself on advertisements and on television) led her to be incredibly rebellious, particularly throughout her middle school and early high school years. While she never overtly caused any trouble, teachers would often complain about how often she skipped class or constantly missed assignments. She had a uniquely forged doctor's note for every delayed test, learning to write professional emails just so that she could pretend to be her own parents. Finding very little fulfillment in the expectations that both her teachers and directors set on her, she turned instead towards excessive reading and writing. It was easy for her to fill hundreds of notebooks with her thoughts or skim through hundreds of pages of newspaper articles, fantasy, fiction -- anything that could pull her away from her day-to-day life.

It took her until high school to break free from the various contracts that she'd been roped into during her youth. While she never quite got back into the academic swing of things, her teachers quickly recognized her drive for writing, pushing her to become a journalism and communications major when she finally applied for university. She had plenty of money stored up from her younger career to fund her education -- and she relished her time alone in college, spending most of her time pursuing extracurriculars rather than actually attending her classes. If you named a journalism club at her school, Irene was probably on the board. If you flipped to any section of her class yearbook, Irene's name was probably credited somewhere on the page.

While her freelance article-writing and editing jobs paid much less than her career as an actress, Irene was happier -- in every way possible. The distance away from her parents gave her the time and space to think about her relationship with her family; she slowly began to reconnect with them, despite how embarrassingly they still acted every time they noticed her name in the subtitle under a big news headline. As she looked for work, she would stumble, almost coincidentally, into the Virion Project. Having just established themselves as an agency, they were looking for writers to fill their Public Relations team -- and Irene knew that she'd be more than capable for the job.

It's been a significant relief for her to step back from the stage, taking a more backseat role in her maintenance of the Virion Project's reputation. Her eye for detail and her lawyerly capability to write things as neutrally -- yet persuasively -- as possible makes her the perfect candidate to type reports, write scripts, and release news updates swaying the public's perception of the Project as a whole. Irene's more than happy to leave the rest of the design work to her close partner, Carabelle. (For how much time she spent on film sets as a child, she was never able to pick up the same artistic vision that her directors seemed to see in all her work).

The Outbreak Incident was a challenge that Irene felt more than ready to face, even though it added a significant amount of work to her schedule. She was used to dealing with strange comments and negative opinions from a wide variety of people, particularly about herself and her work. Irene and Carabelle spent hundreds of hours overnight in the office to make sure that press releases were made on time and scripts could be written to guide their golden boy, Aaron, in his morning Q&A's. Even though it took her hundreds of thousands of words to repair the damage that the Incident had done to the Virion Project's reputation, she'd never experienced so much motivation to actually work before.

While she'd initially picked up the Project as "just another career," deep down, Irene feels more driven to wake up and write than she'd ever had as a child. It's hard for her to believe that she's actually found a cause and a career that she genuinely enjoys and believes in -- and that gives her the fulfillment she lacked throughout her childhood. For once in her life, she's not looking for an exit path. The reliability is more than she could've ever dreamed of.