What? A Character?

Play a character; don’t be merely a piece of scenery.

I’ve played a specific character in nearly all my 40+ background acting assignments. Am I crazy? Perhaps. Am I a professional dedicated to improving the final product; you bet your boots!

Many extras think of themselves as a piece of scenery or as an undiscovered movie star. That’s why, when told to sit in row 9 seat A for the baseball game, they sit there and start chatting with the extra next to them until told by the AD to “quiet down.” When the cameras start to roll, they boo the ump or cheer the team; whatever they were told to do, but they don’t know why they’re doing it. When cameras stop rolling, they revert to what they were before: a minimum-wage place-holder chatting with another drone.
That, my friends, is why many are just filling a hole. They do not respect the task or their own worth.
On a late-September 2009 shoot on The Office, I was appalled to find that many of my fellow background actors didn’t even know what the show was about, had never seen it, were puzzled when I mentioned “Michael Scott” or “Dwight.” If I don’t know the show, I hit Google the minute my calling service hangs up; finding out about the show I’m about to do. It just makes sense if you care about your work.

For the Office shoot, knowing that the show is set in Scranton PA (an area in which I lived for about three years) and knowing the limitations of my skills and appearance, I created Charles “Chaz” Conrad, the owner of Conrad Office Supplies in Wilkes Barre PA. Wilkes Barre is the lesser-known twin city of Scranton. Since Dunder Mifflin is a paper company, it makes sense that I would be someone who buys paper from them. As Chaz Conrad, I struggle daily trying to compete with the “big box” stores like Office Depot, Staples and OfficeMax. I wore a business suit but brought alternatives which included a colorful sweater that looks like something a grandfather would wear. On my trip through the wardrobe gauntlet at the beginning of the first day, the wardrobe woman asked me to wear the sweater instead of the suit coat, as I suspected she would, because she obviously saw my character the way I saw him.

Here’s how this applies to the work at hand:

When the camera caught me standing up to cheer, or being pushed aside by a self-important Dwight Schrute or walking across the lobby of a world-class hotel, it caught a 60-year old owner of an office supply store and not just “an extra in a sweater.”

Creating a character is a foundational part of being a professional background actor. Do the “extra” work to be a character and not a drone and your career will improve.