Excitement abounds at Spellbound HQ today! I found out I appear in Netflix‘s new miniseries 13 REASONS WHY (2017). It’s an adaptation of author Jay Asher‘s young adult novel by the same name. When Netflix was filming it in Vallejo, I applied to be a background performer, how the entertainment industry refers to extras.
Here’s how it worked. The casting agency for the show, Glorioso Casting, was booking extras through a website called My Casting File. I created a profile, and I applied for listed extra spots I fit the description for on days I was available. I got more than one availability request, including some I hadn’t applied for, but I wasn’t available for all.
It turns out my one day on the set was my lucky day. In the first episode about eight minutes in I appear in a sequence! My character description was “Background Pedestrian,” but I perform a role quite familiar to me. I’ve posted screenshots below for you to see my scenes in context.
So there it is! My first non-credit for appearing in a TV show or movie. I hadn’t read the book, so I didn’t know the importance of the movie theatre to the story’s plot or how I lucked into a likely featured moment.
I’ll be watching more of the series and having fun spotting other locally shot scenes. I’ve already seen a lot of Vallejo and my former neighborhood Mare Island. This is a nice coda to my time living there.
