I love watching background characters, those unknown actors who have been hired to enhance a scene. They do it without uttering a word. Most of them spend more time hanging around on the sidelines than they do in front of a camera. They won’t know if their work survived final cuts until they see the released film at a theater or at home. But there they are, gamely giving it their best, populating a scene with all they’ve got. Some do it so naturally that they just fit in. Some over-emote, hooking me for all the wrong reasons. Some don’t quite fit; maybe they belong in a different movie. But almost all extras arrive on set knowing who their self-created character is and how that person ended up at that particular location. Often, they’ve given their characters backstories. If I watch closely enough (and don’t blink), I can sometimes catch glimmers of what that story is.

I like this. Just because the camera is focused on those main characters moving the narrative forward doesn’t mean they’re the only ones with a story to tell. Everyone has one. Every character has a reason to be where they are at that particular time, doing whatever they’re doing. Or at least, they should.

With my interest in background characters, it’s not too surprising that my current manuscript has been hijacked by a character originally brought in to support my protagonist’s plotline. This character’s role in the story didn’t exist when I first mapped everything out. Her chapters don’t even take place in the same era. But there was no denying that the story as written wasn’t quite landing, and this character was insistent that she could help me out. So, I gave her a chance.

I didn’t expect her to take over.

I should have seen it coming. Gradually, I found myself more interested in the new sections of my manuscript, less drawn to what I’d originally assumed was the plot. My bossy new character had a lot to say. Sometimes, she made me laugh out loud. I was connecting with her on a far different level than was happening with my protags. With them, I was an outsider telling their story. But New Girl invited me in, and I couldn’t wait to see where she planned to take us. Finally, I realized that I’d been focusing on the wrong plotline all along.

Can you say “total rewrite”? But that’s okay. The ability of a character to show me something unexpected rounds out the story. It adds dimensions I didn’t see before.

Film extras are in danger of becoming irrelevant. Generative AI tools can easily duplicate people performing background actions. Digital face and body scans reproduce realistic crowd images. This saves a chunk of production costs, because there’s no need to hire a bevy of live actors to populate a scene. But for me, a scene loses something when you take human motivation and unpredictability out of the background. I like the possibility that an extra might go rogue.

My characters are welcome to do that whenever they want.

This explains why we found ourselves watching Forces of Nature, a 1999 rom-com starring Sandra Bullock and Ben Affleck.

The movie isn’t too taxing on the brain. We watched the plot unfold, already able to guess the ending. But then, in an airport scene near the beginning of the film, my internal camera lens swung from the main characters to background actors … because that was no ordinary movie “extra” exiting a cab: it was my dad. I’d forgotten that he’d been a part of this movie. Suddenly I remembered how much fun he’d had, how he’d told us about making the most of his scene (great flounce, Dad). Since an extra never knows if his/her day(s) of work will end up on the cutting room floor, Dad had been particularly pleased to find himself in the finished film. He’s on the screen for maybe five seconds, but he’s on the screen.

This wasn’t my first brush with Dad’s “background talent” work. He’s in Cry Baby (a 1990 John Waters film). Parts of that movie were filmed in my neighborhood, but since Dad lived an hour away, I didn’t expect to see him on my block. He was filming a scene at the laundromat around the corner from my house and thought he’d drop by.

You can find Dad in Barry Levinson’s Avalon (1990), but it’s similar to playing Where’s Waldo. He’s in a crowd waiting to enter a store on a big sale day, wearing a hat in a cinematic era where everyone wore hats.

He’s in 12 Monkeys (1995), too, sitting in a movie theater a row in front of the principals and therefore off-camera. But he’s there.

Locating him in True Lies (1994) is like trying to answer a trick question. That scene where Arnold Schwarzenegger rides a horse through D.C.? Dad’s there, but it was a cold day, so he elected to be a passenger on a nice, warm bus. You can’t see him, but he’s technically in the scene, and a paycheck’s a paycheck.

Dad was more visible in Homicide: Life on the Street (is there an actor in Baltimore who didn’t do Homicide?), where he had a recurring walk-on as a copy-machine repairman. But if you really want to see him in a movie, you need to watch Redneck Zombies, a 1988 gore-fest that has become a trash-cult classic. Dad has a featured role in that one.

Maybe it’s part of my father’s legacy to me, but I nearly always watch the extras. I appreciate the effort they put in, the time they spend waiting, the long hours they contribute on set. Most extras come mentally prepared with character bios and motivations. They work hard to help create the atmosphere of a scene.

No doubt, some actors are better at embracing the “extra” role than others. It can be fun to find the extra who is convinced that the scene is really all about him and the big break that’s sure to follow once he’s noticed.

But you know what? Maybe it is.

(You can read more about my father’s acting background here.)