When kids are asked what they want to be when they grow up, it's safe to say the teachers hear a lot of repeats. Doctors, policemen, firefighters, teachers, baseball players, and famous are probably the most often spouted with the occasional weird kid that throws out the word dentist because maybe his dad is one or maybe he just likes the looks of dread and fear he gets from response in the other children. Oliver Cobb was one who liked to be the reason behind such looks but it was with earnest that he had taken his paper at seven years old and simply written, 'not here.' Of course such an answer caused his young teacher to panic but when a meeting was arranged and Oliver's mom showed up with him reluctantly in tow Oliver he shrugged through it and they all came to the safe conclusion that he had simply meant he didn't want to be in class. Which was true, in a way, but Oliver had always felt like he was stuck in a life he had no interest in being in.
It didn't help that Oliver's dad spent as much time as possible away from their home as possible. He'd claim long hours at the garage but come home with his clothes smelling a combination of beer and cigarette smoke that distinctly meant bar. Which was better than when he didn't come home along. Those days the hours meant weekends and he'd saunter in on a Tuesday with pizza and a smile as if he had just left that morning. With his mom genuinely working overnights at the hospital and his dad eager to skip out on as many parenting duties as possible, Oliver and Janie were left very much to raise themselves--something that Janie proved to do well with and Oliver not so much. Janie became independent in ways most children weren't. She was reliable and responsible and, sure, she could perfectly forge her parents' signatures but it was a talent saved for permission slips and PTA notices. Oliver floundered. There was no one to tell him what to do or when and he took it as an opportunity to not do anything. While Janie mastered the art of cooking dinner and wrestling their broken washing machine into submission, Oliver learned the art of skipping school. Things only got worse when one day Victor Cobb left and didn't come back with a pizza. And while it wasn't entirely unexpected, it still strained the small family as they struggled with trying to ensure ends continued to meet. Lorna had to pull even longer hours and suddenly, at only 13, Janie was expected to run the household. Oliver, being Oliver, got off easily enough. He was expected to help Janie around the house (though he was strictly forbidden from cooking after he got a little to eager with the idea of holy shit there's fire in the stove top) and do his schoolwork, both of which he did little of, but mostly he was just told to stay out of the way and not make things harder than they were.
Only it turned out that Oliver was really good at making things harder than they were. Some of it was his fault, like deciding playing video games was more important than tomorrow's math test or oversleeping because he accidentally set his alarm for 7 PM instead of AM (okay, well, the first time was by accident anyway, after that it would have been a shame if he didn't use such a perfectly legitimate 'mistake' as an excuse more often). Others, however, weren't. He was still just a little kid with too much energy that never really grasped how to focus on a task at hand. He began to fight with Janie constantly, the older child resenting her younger brother for dodging so much responsibility and often screwing up the few tasks she delegated to him and Oliver arguing back that Janie didn't have to do anything she just did so because she was a prissy suck-up. Lorna wasn't around much to mediate and when she did come home the two simply took to arguing through the hushed whispers they'd heard between their parents before them.
Getting older only made things harder and by the time that Oliver hit high school and was long past the acceptable age of being excused from responsibility, he still shucked it. He skipped school and spent as many nights out at friends' houses as he could. Desperate not only to escape the work he was supposed to be doing but the growing disappointment he felt radiating off of his mother and sister. He found himself getting intro trouble constantly, falling into the wrong crowd and then pushing them away to fall into a worse crowd. Friends were a constant turn over in his life as Oliver found it best to never stop moving. It's when you stop moving that you get comfortable and it's when you expect things to stay the same that they all go to shit. He was only fifteen when he met Katie Pope and, much to his dismay, quickly fell in love. It was a sickening high school puppy love that they never seemed to fall out of, strengthened by the fact that the two never felt like they quite fit in the world. Kate was one of six children and dreamed of moving to California and becoming a singer and while Oliver was not one to dream, he found himself beginning to imagine making Kate's dreams come true.
With Janie off at college in the city and Oliver's prospects looking slim, it didn't take long for him to start looking at the conversations he and Kate would have about running off together seriously. Katie was more reluctant but after a fight with her parents on the day after her eighteenth birthday about not wanting to go to college, she showed up on Oliver's doorstep and told him to drive. Oliver would have driven her to the ends of the Earth but California was the destination she had in mind--which was a good thing because his shitty car had barely made it there nevermind how it would have managed water travel. The two lived together in his car for a short time before Kate found work in retail and Oliver scored the very cliche job of waiting at a restaurant. The move into their shitty studio apartment was a day that Oliver counts among the best in his lives, the two stubbornly kicking their way into a world that they were convinced was created to work against them.
It wasn't as if he had intended to start acting but after being scouted for some modeling at his job (a scam, really, though that fact of the story didn't hurt his ego any) he realized that he might as well try. After all, it couldn't exactly be hard could it? And he had always been a rather talented liar. He began attending some auditions on his days off and for the first time, something came easy to him. It was more of a laugh than anything and with his inability to take the process seriously came a certain cockiness that seemed to only help when he went in for one of his firs serious auditions. It was for the role of the bad boy on a show called Gilmore Girls that Oliver had never seen and Kate informed him he would hate. He lied about his age in the audition, claiming to be twenty instead of eighteen and somehow he lucked himself into winning the part. Much like Katie had suspected, he hated the show but he didn't hate being on it and somehow coming to set began to feel like coming home to a family. Not that he ever told them that or anything because like, whatever, it was just a job but still it left him craving more television work when Jess was written off the show.
He had never done routine well as the expected tended to bore him but something about the certainty of having a job gave him much needed structure in his life. Oliver was still very much Oliver in the sense that he said all the wrong things and found himself screwing up more than he succeeded but he was still getting jobs so things seemed to be working out for him. Katie's singing wasn't going as well but she was happy to be creating and living with him in their apartment so that it never caused a rift between them. Or, rather, it never had enough time to cause a rift between them. In 2006, when Katie was only twenty-four years old she was in a car crash that claimed her life three days later. Oliver was devastated and left with the very strong reminder of what happens when you let life get too comfortable. It didn't help that his new WB show had been cancelled only shortly before and Oliver felt him sinking into old habits and new ones. He stopped answering phone calls and blew off anybody could help him and when he was legally obligated to do press and interviews for his first movie, he showed up drunk and swore on red carpets. He was a nightmare, self-sabotaging his first real chance of on-screen success and when the movie flopped it only cemented for him the end of his career. Oliver had done the whole trying thing and frankly, he was over it.
The next few years were spent in a spiral of self-pity during the day and at bars and clubs at night. There was a short period where he gained some notoriety in the gossip columns for his behavior but even this fizzled out when the small name recognition he had turned into nothing. It was Janie who finally snapped him out of it, flying from New York to remind him that he wasn't alone in the world, asshole, and he had a family even if he was intent on ignoring them. Tough love is what he responds to best and while their relationship remained rocky, she began to call him weekly and helped re-establish routine in his life. with no idea what else to do and ok whatever maybe he missed it, Oliver returned to acting with the knowledge that he had to be on his best behavior or, well, you know, try at least. Most of his bridges had been burned through the past few years but he finally found it in him to fight for himself a little and he began winning small parts in small movies.
Of course nothing that Oliver did could have prepared him for becoming a super hero in a major franchise and yet somehow when the agent brought the role up, that's exactly what Oliver realized he wanted--him and just about every other young man in Hollywood but still. James Gunn laughed at the idea at first, but Oliver swung into that audition with all the Peter swagger (god he hated that word but really, how else could he explain it?) he could muster and attempted to charm the pants off them and when that failed, attempted to look as if he were intentionally not charming the pants off them. Oliver had never been the best emotional actor but if there were one role he was convinced he had been born to play, it was Star-Lord. Gunn agreed and suddenly Oliver was thrust into a world of stardom. Okay so it was hardly an instantaneous thrust and it involved a lot of grueling months of no beer and no fun but regardless.
The fame isn't something that he's used to nor is it something he operates well. More than anything Oliver is afraid of fucking this up for himself, whether it be by something he does or something he says, but for the first time there's something stopping him from tanking it on purpose. Maybe he grew up, maybe he's really in love with the movie, or maybe he just likes being famous but whatever it is, it's entirely new for him to factor in. Suddenly he has something to lose, and that goes against just about everything he tries to set up for himself.
