A DIRECT MESSAGE POPPED UP ON FACEBOOK FROM A friend I hadn’t seen in close to a decade.
“Hey!” she wrote. “Are you in the movie Divergent?? I was watching it on a flight and swore I saw you?!”
Every few years, I get a question like this over social media or from a coworker stopping by my desk.
When I first began studying theater at Columbia College Chicago, I would scan the local papers and callboards for opportunities as a movie extra (or, as the tax forms say, “background artist”). I had learned about the concept from my dad, who spent a day on the set of when it was filmed in Chicago in the mid-’80s. He appears over Kevin Costner’s shoulder as a blond background blur in one scene. When I was young, I thought this sounded like the coolest gig — hanging out on a movie set, getting paid while rubbing elbows with celebrities, potentially ending up on the big screen.
