One morning over Spring Break, my alarm went off at 3:30 AM. Yes, AM. In the morning. In a bleary-eyed stupor, I showered, blow-dried my hair, put on a little mascara, threw some clothing options in a bag, made some oatmeal in a mug, and drove forty minutes to a film set. After a few hours of hair and makeup, I then spent about twelve hours sitting at a library table, reading Middlemarch and watching the same scene over and over again.
Sounds boring, right? I’ve done this before. In fact, I’ve done it five times now. Every gig as an extra in a movie or television show moves about the same way. There’s usually an early call time—or a late one, if it’s a night shoot—a few hours of hair and makeup with a pretty good catered breakfast mixed in, and then anywhere from eight to fifteen hours of filming. The catered lunch is also usually pretty fantastic, and there is a table for snacks all day—though the extras’ food isn’t nearly as good as the main cast’s food.
The whole experience is pretty surreal. We’ve all grown up seeing the final product in movie theaters and on television screens, and I have always been fascinated by how the whole process works. Working as an extra has given me a truly wonderful opportunity to see how these stories are made.
I got my first job on Paper Towns during my senior year of high school. You can’t really see me on camera, but I am a blue blur in the background when Nat Wolff is walking down the hallway with his buddies at the beginning of the movie, and my blurry face is in a promotional Instagram post. As “Hallway Walker” and “Prom-Goer In a Pink Dress,” I spent almost fifteen hours watching the director, actors, and crew literally build a movie. They put palm trees outside and directed bright lights through the windows to make this blustery North Carolina day look like summer in Florida. They put tracks on the ground for the cart with a camera to capture tracking shots. They filmed the scene. And then they moved everything so that the camera could get a different shot. And then they filmed it again. One little twenty-second scene could take eight hours to film. And the extras are there for all of it.
There are a few different names for “extras”: “background actors” and “living scenery” are my two favorites. Production Assistants become the pseudo-directors for the background actors, and they are the ones who tell people where to walk and what to do. Every single person and movement is orchestrated, rehearsed, and repeated. Through this job, the PA’s construct fake friendships, families, and conversations. In Paper Towns, they assigned me to a prom group, where I had to pretend to be best friends with a set of strangers. When I worked on Shots Fired this past summer, I became a “Production Assistant” myself, reporting to a fake boss and leading fake employees around behind the main actors. For two days, my brother Jack and I were “Churchgoers” and “Airport Travelers.” This past Spring Break, I was a College Student (how fitting).
I don’t do this job for the money, though it’s definitely a bonus: one day of waiting, “acting,” and eating catered food can culminate in $100. It’s not even all that fun: for every ten minutes of filming, there’s at least an hour of waiting. But the environment, the people that fill it, and the work we all do together is incredibly interesting to watch. People working in film are fascinating; they live busy, hectic lives with long hours and few breaks. They wear cool, weird t-shirts from other film projects, hiking boots, Stetsons, and Pikachu pajama pants. That last item was part of one of the director’s outfits for the day. They are exhausted, hard-working, good-natured people. And the actors? Those famous faces we see on big screens and tabloid covers? They are people, and often pretty weird. One did pushups before every take. Another locked herself in a locker because she wanted to see if she could. They tease one another, call their kids in between takes, and sometimes (rarely) talk to extras while the cameramen are preparing.
There’s something exhilarating about it all, even if the process is painstaking, full of hurrying everywhere and then waiting for hours while people set up lights and reset between takes. For those brief seconds, I step into the universes that millions of people will watch on screens. I will—for a moment, at least—join Nat Wolff, Cara Delevingne, and Jill Hennessy in this fictional place, and then immediately inhabit the real world with them. (I cannot tell you how many times I made awkward eye contact with Nat Wolff. It was glorious.)
And sometimes, after hours of walking in the background, I can see myself on screen. That’s a feeling I will never be able to describe.
Image credits: Taylor Hazan