“Working as a background actor was an exhilarating behind-the-scenes experience”

After graduating from university with a theatre degree, I wanted to get into film, but I didn’t know how to break into the industry. Friends of mine were background actors—­commonly known as extras—and seemed to be having fun. I decided to give it a go and asked them to help set me up.

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My first job, in 2011, was for a movie I don’t think ever got released—it was a big-budget 3-D showcase that featured dancers from So You Think You Can Dance and a K-pop star. I was hired, along with 900 other people, to be a club-goer. The club was in a former slaughterhouse, and let’s just say that the smell had lingered. It was so aggressive that we could be on set for only 15 minutes or so before they had to air out the space. We’d dance really hard for a brief window, then be moved outside into the hot sun to wait. We did this on and off for 15 hours—I ended up with a brutal sunburn.

When I received my paycheque, I realized that being a background actor paid significantly more than my retail job—and I didn’t have to deal with customers yelling at me about returning a sweater. I could handle the occasional sunburn. So I eventually quit retail and did background work for the next five and a half years.

Like at any job, there were things about the work I didn’t like—the hours could be very long, we filmed in extreme weather—but there were highlights too. I was a body double for a sex scene in Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak, I worked closely with Elisabeth Moss on The Handmaid’s Tale and I was part of a car crash scene in the Total Recall remake with Colin Farrell. The filmmakers put explosives under the car and flipped it, and I was one of the people in the crowd freaking out. Once the car had done its thing, the director called cut and replaced the stunt driver with Farrell—who definitely winked at me when everyone was busy setting up.

Some people think background acting is silly, but it allowed me to observe how a film set works. I got to ask a lot of questions and figure out what kind of job I’d ultimately like to do, which led me to a career as an assistant director. I did that for more than a decade before moving into production management. Background acting was my way in—it’s an incredible way to learn.