You're laughing. Okay, if I had to sit around for 8 - 10 hours at a time [and get paid an OBSCENE amount of money to do it], I’d probably laugh at that statement, too. However, I wasn’t pretending to be someone else 36 seconds at at time for the better part of 18 hours, and no one gives a crap if I look bloated after lunch. Consider all the high stakes and "celebrity" factors involved in the job [when was the last time your bad day at work or good day at the gym was national news?], and you’ll see that being an actor is actually hard work.
But not for the extra! Never mind that I made exactly $156 for 17 hours of my time, or that it didn’t cover the dress I bought that no one even saw. Ignore the verbally abusive PA from hell incident. Overlook the sunburn, waiting and, of course, The Jacket, and you'll see,
Being an extra is JUST PLAIN FUN.
The very best part of the entire experience for me was chatting with so many cool people all day long. Christine said I hit it on a good day, which was lucky since it was such a long one. If there are only 4 or 5 extras, you might be stuck with someone who’s no fun to talk to, like The SAG Guy ["Everybody hates The SAG Guy"], but if there are a ton of extras, over 100 to be exact, you can always move around, and you’re sure to find someone interesting.
While Sherry and Dawn were stuck outside for more shots -- since they were standing behind Sayid, Kate, Hurley and Nadia chatting on the church steps before -- [All for naught, I’m afraid. That entire scene didn’t make the finale at all!], I had a chance to sit inside and chit chat.
THE GANG'S ALL HERE
I was very interested to learn that many of the extras that day had been doing this for years. Christian's funeral was like a mini-reunion for them!
Linda, for example, had been an extra since the pilot [something that was "not a big deal" to her at all]. Her real job was as a legal assistant-type person for a refinery. A LIQUOR refinery. I asked her just exactly what that meant, and she said that she basically kept all of the licenses in order both for the refinery and for the businesses that picked up their liquor there.
If you live here in Hawai’i, Linda’s job is really funny since no one would ever try very hard to follow those rules if it meant putting someone [like a small bar owner] out, and there isn’t any oversight of any kind to make sure those rules are being followed.
When I mentioned this, she said, well, I don’t spend a lot of time shredding things, if that’s what you mean.
[?!?]
What she does spend time on is her writing, and after publishing a few short stories online, she is shopping her first novel, a “murder mystery about a crack investigative reporter and a private detective who try to solve a murder while bickering and having sex as often as possible.” I asked her if it was set in Hawai’i, and she said that she had to set it in California because there aren’t any private beaches in Hawai’i. Everyone outside of Hawai’i would think it was weird if her heroes never had sex on a beautiful beach, and no one living in Hawai’i would be able to read about it without wondering when the homeless or tourists will wander by and interrupt the happy couple.
[Yeah -- I really liked talking to Linda!]
I also learned that Linda had never even watched the show. In fact, after years of being an extra at least 5 or 6 times a season, she really couldn’t tell me the first thing about it! Linda was part of a large camp of extras who were like that. They either had been or were still actors and were filling their resumes, or they had been turned on to the job through a friend or neighbor and just kept coming back every time they were called. They were almost proud that they didn’t watch the show.
Weird, right?
Dawn, the gorgeous, African-American model from Texas, said that she always gets called. I said it was because she was beautiful and could look like she’s 20 or 12, but she said it was because there were so few Black people on the island and even fewer that could drop everything for an entire day to be on the show. She said, “I’m sorry, but you can’t ‘be’ in New York without Black people there.”
The basic truth is: if you are trying to recreate a grocery store in Iowa or a posh funeral in Beverly Hills, the primary ethnic groups in Hawai’i, namely Asian and Pacific Islander, are not going to always look believable in the background. Dawn said the main reason Sherry and I got the job was because they were short on enough white people to pull off the funeral!
Dawn was, fortunately, also a fan of the show, and when we finished shooting "Jack's" eulogy, we three had a nice discussion about our theories of LOST. Then, since she manages properties in Texas as well as Hawai'i, she gave me some really good tips about where to buy a home.
THE OTHERS
The most fun people to talk to were the extras who had been extras on the beach with the crash survivors. Talk about important pond scum! About 15 of them had to actually sign contracts saying they'd be extras for good, and if they had to leave, they were replaced by extras who looked as much like them as possible.
Dawn said that the latest events on the show really have the original guys in a bind. Once you’ve been very noticeable [like the guy Sun notices in the hallway when she is having the baby], your file gets marked, and they won’t use you for a while. Since almost everyone at the beach was killed off, now those extras can’t be used for very much anymore except “fillers” like us at the funeral.
One such extra was a guy named Dustin Watchman, a real cutie [and total FLAKE], who worked as a stand-in for Matthew Fox the day we were there. He was of special interest to Sherry, partially because he is very cute (much more so in person) and partially because once he was stuck waiting outside with the extras near the end of the day, he was quite chatty about being on the set in the past. Sherry never did give him her number [in her opinion, he should ask for it!], but we learned that he got the job as a stand-in because he was one of the original extras on the beach [Steve] who was deliberately killed off [by Ethan] as part of the plot. Since it was a pretty friendly group who had NO idea how big the show was going to be when they started, the production guys felt bad about kicking him off entirely.
[Stand-ins do just that. They Stand In for the “real” actors when the camera and lighting and sound guys are setting up. That way, the actors can just pop in after everything is set up and only Act, rather than standing around.]
He also explained a bit of the “anti-pond scum” persona of the “stars.” He said that if there are only a few extras, the principle actors can be friendly and joke around. However, if they start doing that with 100 extras, now everyone wants their turn to have a friendly chat, and it slows everything down. Because of the writers’ strike, they were playing catch-up with the show. Our 17 hour day was just one of the 16-18 hour days they were shooting, 6 days a week for over 5 weeks to get everything finished on time. Time to be nice to the pond scum was just another casualty of the strike.
We could tell that the big actors felt weird about it, too. Hawai’i is a small place, and one does not walk near another without some kind of acknowledgment. We had to share bathrooms for a while with the big guns, and if you were right up on them, you just had to smile. I mean, technically, Christine said, we were supposed to never look or talk to them. We were supposed to just pretend they didn’t exist, and they were supposed to do the same. However, that didn’t always follow, and when we were roasting in the church during Jack’s eulogy, Naveen Andrews stood up, turned around panted at us, flapping his jacket, and even winked at Mary! (Cheeky!)
I got caught up in this particular game with Matthew Fox.
DON'T ASK, DON'T TELL
Before I tell you that story, I have to tell you this. After I worked on this set, I saw some moron post a “spoiler” about what happened at the funeral based on what his friend “who was working as an extra” found out during the shoot.
Personally, I HATE spoilers. I do NOT want to know anything beforehand. I’m lucky that way because despite a rabid interest in the show, the fans themselves have their own (kinda scary) policing method of dealing with people who find things out early and then blow it for the rest of us.
I can’t tell you much about psycho fans, but I can tell you this. If anyone says they learned something about the plot from someone working as an extra, tell them you know better. I was on that set for a LOOONG time, and all I learned is that:
- Sayid is shorter than you’d think,
- Hurley looks exactly the same as he does on the show, and
- Evangeline Lilly is, perhaps, the smallest person I’ve ever laid eyes on.
I mean, she’s like a popsicle stick. When she turns to the side, you can’t see anything but her hair. (But she’s not small in an I-starve-myself-to-be-small way which is deceptively refreshing.)
Finally, and most importantly for my story, I learned that Matthew Fox is. . .
[Heh, heh.]
Next Up: Don't Be the Pogue Part 1
