Good thing about being a hollywood extra: the pay. bad thing: being pulled up for overacting

Good thing about being a hollywood extra: the pay. bad thing: being pulled up for overacting

In a couple of months, a film called Clash Of The Titans will hit your screens. It's a remake of the 1981 film in which Greek gods and monsters, well, clash. If you look closely, in one or two scenes you may see the top of my head or an elbow because last August, I was a film extra.

Nine years ago, I worked in a casting agency in London for extras. A photographer called Mike took shots of the dozens of people who'd just joined up. My job was to take the picture files from his camera and put them on to a hard drive. The pay was menial but you got to meet a good few characters or, at least, extras.

I'd wanted to be an extra or background artisteu00a0 since 1984's Indiana Jones And The Temple of Doom. Many of the slave children from the mine sequences in that Steven Spielberg movie were from my school in west London (some went on to work in jade mines in Africa). But the people in my year didn't know about the casting, it was for the years below.

I must admit to being ever-so-slightly jealous of one boy, Raj Singh, who was two years above me. He went to stage-school over the weekend, if I remember correctly, and landed the plum speaking role of the Little Maharaja of Pankot, sat opposite Harrison Ford at that infamous feast where the heads of monkeys were used as bowls and creepy crawlies were chewed alive.

I didn't need a speaking part, I would have been happy being whipped in the mines like Rajan Das from class 1B, whose smiling face when the slaves were set free got to fill one frame and a good split second of the Spielberg movie.

Clash Of The Titans happened when a friend of mine, working on it last summer, noted I was looking for bread to eat after spending three months in India and suggested I sign up. The pay was good and I couldn't say no. (On her next film she worked with Clint Eastwood. I begged her to get me in but because I'd been in a row with the catering staff on Clashu2026, who then started to refuse me breakfast, she decided not to. Still, I asked her how Eastwood addressed her. She said, imitating his unmistakable voice: "Hey, doll.")

In Clashu2026, I was cast as a religious zealot barbarian which, being Irani, I wasn't happy with; in my own country that's enough to make me president! Worryingly, the make-up department didn't add too much to me when I turned up every day at 6 am. "Take your glasses off," they said. No one wore them in ancient Greece. But they did get me to grow a beard.

Often, as an extra, you face the challenge of doing absolutely nothing for hours. You can't even read a book or listen to your iPod the costume people will take it off you. One day, dozens of us were sat for what seemed like a thousand years, in a studio where a big fire pit had been constructed.

This along with the lighting rigs created an oven-like intensity. I walked around talking to different people, as you do, in the hope that they would let me count their fingers, having run out of my own.

When we were shepherded into action we invariably had to express surprise or fear. I got pulled up for overacting with 'jazz-hands' when the invisible Kraken rose out of the sea.

Because of the heat, the set needed constant watering down after each take. The repetitive nature of this was enough to make you apply for a job where you removed pictures from one disk and placed them into a hard-drive.

Next month I have the option of being a film extra again my head will be shaved and I'll be waxed all over. This suggests I won't be wearing much, which, with the weather as cold as it is in England right now, will be just short of physical abuse. Naturally I'll say yes.

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