There are no small parts — only small actors! That’s what people have said for decades in Hollywood. And they’re right! It’s not how many lines you have, but how well you deliver those lines, and how memorable you are in your role.
Big or small, leading actor or supporting cast member, whatever it takes for you to get your foot in the door is the thing that’ll lead to more and more success in Tinseltown. Or something like that.
But what about extras? After all, it’s one thing to get your start with a very small part in a movie or show. But even small parts have lines. Or, you know, a line. But extras don’t have any lines at all! They just sit in the background! So, how do you make that work when it comes to catapulting to stardom?
Related: ‘Spring Breakers’ Supposedly Filmed Extras Doing WHAT?!
Well, you’ll be surprised to hear that plenty of A-list actors actually started their careers as extras!
Scroll down to learn their surprising stories…
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Bruce Willis
You wouldn’t know it to look at him based on his high-profile body of work, but action icon Bruce Willis got his start as an extra. The superstar began by working in the background on movies like The First Deadly Sin. He also was an extra in some very minor TV roles. One day, a pal working as a director of photography helped him get an extra role in Paul Newman’s The Verdict. Paul liked him so much that Bruce parlayed that into bigger small-time roles… and eventually landed his big break.
Years later, Willis recalled his time as an extra on The Verdict:
“I worked for a couple of weeks during the time that Paul Newman was doing his summation scene to the jury in the film. They worked it out for me to be right behind Paul Newman’s table. There are scenes of me and Paul, same shot. Me with goofy, long hair. I showed [Paul]. Cracked him up.”
Funny indeed… because it all worked out!
Troian Bellisario
Troian Bellisario was a young kid when she was first cast as an extra in a movie called Billboard Dad, which starred none other than Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. But while the Full House twins were the big shots on set, Troian was just getting her feet wet in the business as a very lowly (and very forgettable!) extra.
But that’s not even the crazy part! The crazy part is that Troian had grown up with Mary-Kate and Ashley as a very young girl. The trio were childhood friends, and then the Olsen twins went off to make it big in Hollywood. So, when Bellisario showed up on set as an extra in the duo’s film, the young childhood friends were surprised to reunite!
It must have seemed like a one-in-a-million shot for that to happen. And it worked out in the end, too — since the Olsen twins were obviously superstars, and Troian later ended up going all-the-way with Pretty Little Liars! AH-Mazing!
Ben Affleck
Ben Affleck was just a teenager when he started doing work as an extra on projects like Field of Dreams, The Good Mother, and the Buffy, The Vampire Slayer movie. The producers of that Buffy movie even liked him so much that they decided to give him one line. But… when it came time for post-production, they actually dubbed over his speaking voice and cut him out of the flick altogether!
Ben thought his delivery as a lowly extra had been good enough, but producers clearly felt otherwise. Years later during an interview on The Late Late Show, Affleck recalled:
“I got one line. It was for a basketball player. I was feeling it, and then I went and saw the movie with friends … and I sounded very different. And I realized right then they re-recorded my line. I was so bad. They needed me to be in the scene, but the director obviously [was like], ‘I can’t hear the voice again!’ They had to pay someone to come in and say, ‘Hey man, take it.’ Because apparently, I couldn’t say that convincingly enough.”
Oh, to think about how far Affleck has come since then…
Matt Damon
Just like his childhood friend, star-to-be Matt Damon got his start as an extra. The most noteworthy one of those was Kevin Costner’s iconic baseball movie Field of Dreams. For that flick, producers hired Ben and Matt to sit in the stands and act like baseball fans while a game was being filmed. Damon and Affleck didn’t have speaking roles in that movie, but they nevertheless made an impression on Costner that persists to this day.
Years later, during an interview with Jimmy Kimmel, Costner recalled:
“They were sitting in the stands, like college guys. They would both lean in at the same time, lean back at the same time, look at each other at the same time. They had this big enthusiasm. They were on fire. I do remember them, absolutely.”
Unbelievable!
Damon himself also recalled that time working as an extra on Field of Dreams, too. In a separate interview with Kimmel years later, the Rounders star said:
“I remember it well. I literally had an Untouchables poster on my wall. [Costner] came out and hung around with the extras in between setups. I asked him what he was doing, and he said, ‘shooting the s**t,’ and I laughed like a 12-year-old girl. It was a big deal for us because he had the exact career that we wanted. He was very nice to us.”
Aww. What an unexpectedly sweet story!
Taraji P. Henson
At the very beginning of her career, actress Taraji P. Henson made a few forgettable appearances on a couple popular teen shows including Felicity and Saved By The Bell: The New Class. She was just a background actor on each of those shows, but at one point, she tried to convince the producers of Saved By The Bell that she ought to have a larger role than just doing extra work.
She explained it to late-night TV host Stephen Colbert once:
“I tried to convince the producers that they needed me as a series regular but it didn’t work.”
Oh, no! Thankfully, she persisted with trying to land a larger career in Hollywood, and her persistence paid off. Good for her!
Brad Pitt
It’s hard to imagine somebody as handsome as Brad Pitt working as an extra at the start of his career, but that’s exactly what happened. For his first two years in Hollywood, Brad trudged through the world as a background actor. He was in all kinds of movies doing background work, including Hunk, No Way Out, and No Man’s Land. But more than anything else, he was proud of his extra acting work in the movie Less Than Zero — because it finally earned his SAG card!
He once told W Magazine about his experience on that final and ultimately important film:
“They grabbed me to be, like, the waiter. It was a big dinner scene at a restaurant, and they had me pour champagne in the glasses, and I thought, ‘I’m gonna try to get a line in.’”
But unfortunately for Brad, that plan didn’t work at all! He recalled:
“I poured one, maybe it was Charlie [Sheen], I don’t know. And then another actor’s, and then I got to this actress at the end and I poured her drink, and then I looked at her and I said, ‘Would you like anything else?’ She looked at me and went, ‘Ugh.’ The first Assistant Director goes, ‘cut, cut, cut, cut,’ and he came over to me and he said, ‘You do that again, you’re off the set.’”
Renée Zellweger
Renée Zellweger dreamed of becoming an actress since she was in college. During those years on campus, she tried to get her foot in the door, too. While studying at the University of Texas, that got her a role as an extra in the iconic movie Dazed And Confused. She also booked some small parts in local films, just trying to make a buck and get prepared for what she hoped was a long career ahead.
But it was that extra work on the Matthew McConaughey film that really stuck in her mind — and her future. Zellweger explained once to Kimmel:
“I kind of just popped around. I think my official title was featured extra. They said, ‘We’re not gonna hire you but if you want to come down and be a part of the production — you know, you’re not going to have any speaking lines or anything — but we would like you to be here for continuity.’”
And that’s how she got her start!
Regé-Jean Page
When it came time for Regé-Jean Page to start his acting career, he got his first big (er, uh, small) break as a background actor in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1. He was there to portray a guest at the wedding of Bill Weasley and Fleur Delacour — and he knocked it out of the park. Uh, ya know, just being a guy standing in the background of the shot and all. Ha!
Still, it proved to be a formative and formidable experience for the hopeful and aspiring actor, as he explained once years later on The Tonight Show:
“The best thing about background acting, particularly on big movies like that — and I recommend it to every actor out there — is no one pays attention to you in the background, so you get to be the best actor spy. I was just watching, like, how these directors work with these actors, where Emma Watson hides her phones between takes, and that is the valuable stuff. It was under the tablecloths at the wedding, by the way. Sorry, Emma.”
Megan Fox
Megan Fox was only 15 years old when she scored a role as an extra in Bad Boys II. Cool, right? Well, there was a problem: she was paid to play a dancer in a club… and she definitely wasn’t old enough to legally be allowed in a real-life club — or drink alcohol, as the scene called for. And because she was unable to legally sit at the bar to even shoot her scenes, director Michael Bay had to make some changes to his plans for using her.
Oh, and there was a problem with that, too — because Bay’s solution seemed even more problematic. Fox recalled the issue years later to Jimmy Kimmel:
“We were shooting this club scene, and they brought me in, and I was wearing a stars and stripes bikini and a red cowboy hat, and six-inch heels. And they took me to [Bay] and he approved it. And they said, ‘You know, Michael, she’s 15, so you can’t sit her at the bar and she can’t have a drink in her hand.’”
So, Bay made some changes. As Megan explained to the late-night TV host:
“So his solution to that problem was to then have me dancing underneath a waterfall getting soaking wet. And that’s at 15. I was in tenth grade. So that’s sort of a microcosm of how Bay’s mind works.”
Uh… we’re not sure if that’s a good thing!
[Image via MEGA/Ivan Nikolov/Apega/WENN]
