A Day In The Life Of An Extra

On Friday the wonderful people at Cut Above Casting told me I’d once again been booked as an Extra on Fox’s “Glee” on Monday, and gave me instructions to call the casting line on Saturday to find out what my call time was. I did this, and was slightly annoyed to find it was 7am. Fortunately it was at Paramount Studios in Hollywood, which is remarkably easy for my to get to, even without a car. All I have to do is hop on my bike, cycle down to the North Hollywood Metro Station, get the train to Hollywood & Vine, then cycle down to Paramount from there. It’s a doddle.

Unfortunately it’s a doddle that requires me getting up at around 4am in the morning, using only my iPhone alarm (which has a tendency to not go off at all). My Dad suggested using my laptop as an alarm clock and that’s exactly what I did, but I hadn’t used it that way before and I didn’t want to hedge my bets, so on Sunday night I went onto one of the three forums I usually visit and posted this lovely message:

Can someone call or Skype me at around 12:30pm BST?

That’s 4:30am my time. My Skype handle is Squirminator2k, and all Skype calls are routed to my mobile phone if I’m not currently signed in.

I trust none of you will, uh, abuse this power.

I went to bed at around 10:30pm. My brain, being what it is (which is my brain, a buzzing, whirring, processing machine designed to come up wth brilliant ideas at inconvenient hours of the night), started buzzing and whirring and coming up with brilliant ideas at inconvenient hours of the night. 1am rolled by and I figured I’m not going to get any sleep under my own strength, so I popped a small blue sleeping tablet.

After a few minutes I started to feel very, very heavy. And then everything started melting…

Alarms went off at 4am. I turned off one and hit Snooze on the other. I hit Snooze again at 4:09am, 4:18am, and 4:27am, wondering why whoever designed alarm clocks thought it would be a great idea to use nine-minute snooze intervals.

At 4:30am my phone rang. The display informed me that the incoming call was coming from somebody named “Ben Paddon”. That struck me as a bit odd so I answered the phone…

“Hello?”
“Hello, it’s Marleen!”
“Oh, hi!”
“[Something I didn’t really hear because I hadn’t woken up yet.]”
“I’m up!”
“[Something to the effect of ‘Oh, good.’]”
“Thank you!”
“[Something that might have been ‘You’re welcome.’]”
“Bye!”
“Bye!”

I decided to get out of bed, a decision I made again at 4:36am when my alarm let me know that I’d somehow fallen asleep after that incredibly engaging phonecall. I jumped out of bed, had a very brief shower, brushed my teeth, moisturized, threw on some clothes, and packed a change of clothing incase Wardrobe thought that the clothing I’d picked myself at 4:48am in the morning with all the lights turned off and my senses still trying to work out why I’m not dreaming about Captain Kirk wrestling a gorilla in a Very Special Episode of Blossom were somehow not good enough for them.

By 5:05am I was ready to go. I put on my iPod, electing to listen to MC Frontalot on the way to the station, and sch-schoomed on my bike towards North Hollywood. I got there at around 5:50, and I was eventually on a moving train at about 6:10. At 6:20 the train arrived at Hollywood & Vine, and at 6:35 I was at Paramount Studios.

I approached the gate silently cursing for cheating myself out of half an hour’s extra sleep. Turns out that I shouldn’t have been cursing myself at all – Security couldn’t find a visitor’s pass for me. I began to panic – I did remember to call the casting agency back and confirm I was coming, didn’t I? Oh Glod, what if I didn’t? What if I’m not confirmed for today? Did I cycle all the way down here for nothing?

At this point another regular Extra, Caleb, walked into the gate, and security couldn’t find him on the system either. Caleb said he’d definitely confirmed, and my worry began to wane a little. Then the security guard gave me the second best news I had all day:

“Sorry guys. Our system crashed last night and I guess it’s still down. You guys just go on in.”

“But, the turnstile isn’t turnstiling.”

“Just push it halfway and slide through. You guys are pretty skinny.”

People, Monday would have been a great day for you to sneak onto Paramount’s set.

I got into Extras Holding at 6:50, which is where they keep the Extras when they’re not in use, and signed in. This was it – I’d made sure I would get there on time, and I was prepared for a day of standing around on set, pretending to talk, or drink, or walk, or whaveer. It was going to be fantast–

We spent most of the day sat in holding, which at one point moved from the backstage area we were in to Glee’s High School Hallway sets. I think we were only used for three shots. We spent the majority of the twelve hour day sat in holding. I’d brought my laptop, so Paramount essentially paid me to play Worms Armageddon, and to occasionally check my Facebook profile. Just like every other employee I’ve had, then.

It was, in all honesty, great to be back on set. Being an Extra is sometimes an incredibly thankless job – you get yelled at, you get shepherded around like livestock, you get simple instructions repeated to you six or seven times because sometimes an AD will assume that each and every Extra on set is a gibbering moron with all the mental power of a Cornish Pasty. But working on Glee is a completely different experience. The crew really seem to care about the Extras. They’ll chat with us, they’ll have fun, and they try to make our time on set as comfortable and as easy as possible. The cast are brilliant, too – I had a couple of conversations with the awesome Josh Sussman, during which I was trying to work out whether he was naturally kind of skittish or if he was just very in-character.

Glee probably isn’t the sort of show I’d want to watch (although I won’t know until the pilot airs on May 19th – for all I know it could be brilliant), but it’s definitely the sort of show I want to work on, and to keep working on. Everybody’s focused on their work, but they’re clever enough to want to have a good time while they do it. If only every production could be this fun.