Background Artist

The call time was 4:45 a.m., which is not a time so much as a threat. I'd been told to arrive with my hair unwashed and "nothing on my face", which is how I found myself in a car park behind a leisure centre in Yorkshire at half four in the morning, in July, looking like a woman who'd been dug up. There were about sixty of us. Background, they call it. Not extras. A woman with a clipboard and a radio said "background" like it was a species and moved us into a marquee where there were tea urns and rows of trestle tables and, along one wall, rails and rails of clothes. I was a "market woman". That was my whole character. A wool skirt that came to my ankles, a blouse, a shawl, boots that had been worn by, going by the smell, several previous market women. The wardrobe girl pinned me in, looked at me, took the shawl off, put a different shawl on, and said, "Lovely, you're perfect, don't sit down." I didn't sit down for three hours. We got to set at eight. The set was a real village, a proper one, with the street cobbled and the signs taken down and straw put down over the road and a man whose entire job seemed to be moving a wheelbarrow of turnips from one side of it to the other. It was already hot. My skirt weighed about the same as a small dog. They put me on a stall. Apples. Wooden ones, painted, very convincing. My direction, from a young man with a headset, was: "When we roll, you sell apples. Don't look at camera. Don't look at the actors. Don't talk, mime talking. Reset when we cut." "Who am I selling to?" He looked around. Grabbed a man in a flat cap who'd been standing nearby. "Him." Him was called Dennis, sixty-two, retired postman, who'd been doing background for eleven years and had been, he told me between takes, in "four of the big ones and a Christmas advert." He knew everything. Where to stand so you were in shot but not in the way. When to eat. That you should never, ever talk to the principal actors unless they talked to you first, and if they did, keep it short.

"They're working," he said. "They're at work. You wouldn't chat to a surgeon." The principal actor arrived at ten. I'm not going to say who. You'd know the name. He walked down the straw-covered street with two people either side of him and a woman running behind with an umbrella against the sun, and he stopped about six feet from my apple stall, and they did a scene. Nine times. Nine times he walked down the street and stopped and said a line to a woman in a bonnet, and nine times I sold Dennis a wooden apple, and each time the actor did the line very slightly differently and each time, I swear, it was better. Between takes he stood there, six feet away, and looked at nothing. Just stood. Not on a phone. Not talking. Dennis said that was normal for the good ones. "Saving it," he said. On the seventh take the actor turned, mid-line, and looked directly at me for maybe half a second. Not at camera. At me. The market woman. And he did a tiny nod, the nod you'd give a stallholder in a village in 1850, and then turned back and finished his line. Nobody told him to do that. It wasn't in the script. He just did it, because a man walking down a street would. They called cut. He walked off with the umbrella. I stood there holding a wooden apple. "Did you see that," I said to Dennis. "I saw it." "He looked at me." "He looked at the apple woman. Different thing. Better thing." Dennis adjusted his cap. "That'll be in the film, that. Half a second. You'll be in it." We wrapped at seven. Fourteen hours. I got my shawl unpinned and my boots off and my hundred and ten pounds and I drove home with the windows down, smelling of wool and straw and somebody else's sweat, and I've never felt so much like I'd done a day's work. The film's out next year, apparently. I'll be the one with the apples. Watch for the nod.