Josh Linden, Jonathan Pine, Nathaniel Walnut
This past week, I watched all of The Night Manager, a BBC/AMC prestige espionage drama from 2016 starring Tom Hiddleston, Olivia Colman, Hugh Laurie, and Elizabeth Debicki.
But I'm not here to talk about the plot of this show. (It's definitely self-aware that it's a prestige drama.)
I'm not here to talk about how hot everyone is on this show. (So goddamn hot.)
I'm not even here to comment on how Tom Hiddleston never buttons his shirt higher than his sternum for this entire show, or how inexplicably often he's costumed in flip flops, or the fact that this show's release coincided with his brief, yet public relationship with Taylor Swift. (This was ultimately a win for us, the listening public.)
No, I'm here to talk about hearing my own name in a TV show.
"Josh Linden" never gets mispronounced in my day-to-day. It's barely ever misspelled.
Both "Josh" and "Linden" are common enough that I'm not surprised by hearing them out in the world. There's lots of actors and athletes and celebrities named "Josh" and there's even more "Linden" streets across these United States.
But "Linden" isn't as common as you would think as a name, which means that I'm not entirely desensitized to the fact that my last name might be the same as an actor or an athlete or a celebrity.
So when Tom Hiddleston's character introduced himself under the alias "Jack Linden," I did a double take.
I looked at Nora. She looked at me. We both said, "Did he say Jack Linden?" out loud.
He did. Though it wasn't exactly the same as my name, it's the closest I've ever been to hearing it out loud as a fictional character.
(The whole thing was that Hiddleston's character, Jonathan Pine, was using other tree-based surnames for his aliases, such as Linden and Birch.)
I'm not sure how the real-life Walter Whites and Liz Lemons that have to exist in the world feel when they hear their names, but even hearing something three letters off elicited a strange combination of excitement and violation.
On the one hand, I felt an instant rush of adrenaline and a childlike urge to shout, "That's my name!"
On the other hand, who is Tom Hiddleston to take my name from me? What if he does something reprehensible to sully the family name??
In the end, I think I'm realizing the privilege of having a "standard," yet less common American name. It's all perks and no downsides; I have the privilege of never having to explain myself or my heritage, while also getting to feel excitement when my name does pop up places. "Josh Linden" is the kind of name where a friend texts me if they see a street with the same name, and also no one is blown away by that street existing or wonders what country that street name came from.
But it is definitely spooky to hear a handsome man with piercing eyes and an allergy to top buttons basically call himself your name.
Anyway, here's a bunch of tree-based aliases that they didn't use on the show:
Geoffrey Larch
Jed Aspen
Timothy Olive
Derek Eucalyptus
Rodrigo Redwood
Winston Sycamore
Jake Laurel
Richard Banyan
Matthew Cherry
Benjamin Willow
Jeremiah Pistachio
Anthony Magnolia
Nathaniel Walnut
Alastair Fraser-Fir
Sebastian Yuzu
Joshua Joshua
Horatio Fiddly Fig
Feel free to use any of them when you're breaking up your next illegal arms trade deal. Just don't take "Linden".