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Denver, present day

It's a very odd experience to watch your best friend die. To see the life seep out of their eyes and go dark. To witness them at their most broken and vulnerable. To consider that someone you know personally, intimately, has shuffled off this mortal coil—and that someday you will too.

I can only imagine how much worse it would be if it were real.

By my count, I've seen Errol die three times. The first was when he lost his arms to a deranged maniac wielding a chainsaw and I watched his warm shallow breaths—which I had once counted rhythmically for almost an hour on a bus while he slept—turn frigid in the winter air before gurgling to a stop in a pool of blood.

Then I saw him take a bullet meant for someone else, and bleed out on the street in his sister's arms. And most recently of all, I watched him waste away from some rare, untreatable cancer that hollowed out his copper eyes and shrank his once-rippling body down to the skeleton, to where I wasn't sure I even recognized him anymore. That one was the scariest for me because it was so real and unfair.

In truth, I don't mind the violent ones as much. Who hasn't wanted to make Errol bleed once or twice?

Errol has made a good living out of appearing—and dying—in adaptations of blockbuster novels, a tactical move that's surely no accident. Bestsellers have a built-in audience of rabid fans who wait for years to devour their film adaptations. They get a lot of press and bring in tons of cash. But they can also be dicey. Bad direction or online consensus that you didn't "nail" the character can hurt a career as quickly as it can make one.

He's got a pretty good track record though. Reviews are always calling his performances "striking," "absorbing" and "fierce." Maybe because he brings the same dynamism to the screen that he does to his real life—that magnetic personality that makes you want to be his friend because he smiles a lot and knows how to match his sense of humor to your mood. And that warm and intoxicating manner of speaking, which makes you feel like you're the only person alive.

I guess you could say it's pretty absorbing when it makes you think everything he's saying is reasonable—so that even if you absolutely despise horror films, you end up thinking, sure, maybe he's right this time, it's probably not so scary. I trust him.

He's a solid, charismatic actor, but I wouldn't call him a once-in-a-generation talent or anything. He's just an above-average theater geek with a perfectly-placed birthmark, the face of a Greek god—and probably some better luck.

Oh, and he's got his intelligence. Let's not forget that. In a world of stupid actors, it's taken him pretty far.

When I first considered Errol's film debut, I had assumed that he had charmed the director and the producers with his near-encyclopedic knowledge of the horror genre. That's probably part of it. But now that I really think about it, it makes sense that he got that particular role. Like all of Errol's best work—the YA cancer film, the sleeper-hit indie, even the melodramatic sci-fi trilogy—it was based on a book. Again, it's no accident that his career only picked up once he graduated from NYU, magna cum laude, naturally.

In college, Errol killed himself with a double major in film and literature to make himself a smarter actor. In addition to film theory and acting, he took the same compositional lit classes I did, where you spend a lot of time deconstructing characters and symbolism on a granular level. Our theater professor in Brussels loved him because, well, everyone likes Errol, but also his comments in class were insightful and witty, and he visibly contrasted strength and weakness in his Edward II performance, while I just stood there reading my lines and freaking out that I was holding his phone.

While we wrote our paper together, he stood over my shoulder as I typed and we debated the real meaning of obsession, power and loyalty—themes that were hardly lost on me as I contemplated my own relationship with Errol.

I'm the better writer, even he knew that, but Errol could spin BS into comp lit gold. We took apart our characters and put them back together line by line. We got an A.

So it doesn't take much to imagine how he leaves such a big impression on authors. He's an actor, but he's a reader too. He cultivates a perfect Instagram lifestyle, but he lives for books. He's one of them, but deep down he's really one of us.

It's been years since he's cut me out for good—three and counting—but of course I still keep tabs on his career. How could I not? His next film's a starring role alongside Julianne Moore about a boy who comes into a valuable work of Dutch art as a teenager and the chain reaction of havoc it causes. It starts shooting next month.

No points for guessing that it's based on a book that was on the bestseller list for two years—a "national obsession" Vanity Fair called it. I've seen people reading it on beaches and in cafes, and spotted its white-yellow cover tucked in strollers and placed on airport book stands so precariously close to the corridor you could trip over them.

Knowing Errol, he's read and reread it, gathering enough material for the ten page paper he's written in his head. By this point, I think word's gotten around and authors must have him on speed dial. I'm sure he paid this latest one the very best compliments of her life with his piercing attention to detail.

For a long time, I resisted reading the book, but now that Errol's going to be in it I finally broke down and bought it. I'm only three-quarters of the way through, and already I'm wondering if there's another death in store for him. I know it'll make me squeamish when I read it and see it on the screen, but a tiny part of me can't wait to see him die again. I really like this author and her tight, unsparing style.

And if she doesn't kill him, I hope she makes him bleed.