People in Hollywood like blowing up New York. In May, I was an extra in a movie where space monsters destroy Chinatown. And this week I played several unconscious bodies in a movie where aliens attack Coney Island. I was lucky enough to be one of the bodies on the Wonder Wheel, so I essentially got paid to take a nap on a Ferris wheel. Nice work if ya can get it.
The job in May was from a small casting company that books me a couple of times a year. It was a great gig! It filmed on a Sunday, with a call time of 3:30 in the morning. But the the good news is that we got a bunch of pay bonuses according to Screen Actors Guild rules, so I made twice what I would normally make for a ten-hour shoot! As I’ve said many times, SAG is great at wringing money out of producers.
My role was “Pedestrian #12” but there were 400 other extras portraying panicky civilians. And there were actors dressed as National Guard troops driving around in real Humvees, and firing machine guns. The kind of prop guns that fire blank ammo that sounds real. One scene had a bomb go off in the middle of third avenue, and we had to shoot this several times. So the local residents got to hear this warzone happening over and over again as the director shot footage from every possible angle.
If you live on east Canal street by the Manhattan bridge, then I was one of the people who ruined your Mother’s Day.
I had never done one of these disaster scenes before, so it was a fun day for me, running from imaginary monsters, scattering when the Army opens fire with those realistic .50 caliber machine guns. When the movie comes out this will only be one minute of footage, but it’s so elaborate that the extras were called in to rehearse it for a week beforehand. That was the first time I had ever been asked to rehearse a scene as an extra. And I gotta tell ya, Pedestrian Number 12 was ready to go when it was time to shoot!
While pretending to cower from aliens, one of the other actors asked me how things have been going. I made my usual non-committal response. I always like to hear how much work other extras get, on average. If you’ve been reading this blog, you’ll know that transgender people get less work than other actors. I pull in less than one day a month on average, so getting paid to shoot a scene AND rehearse it made May a busy month for me.
And trans actresses used to get stereotyped as “Trans Hooker” and “LGBT Type.” After four years of legal battles, I’m consistently getting work as nondescript pedestrians, but it has taken seven human rights cases through NY State and New York City to reach this point.
It’s rare for me to be booked for more than one day on the same project, and this booking made two days of work in the same month. A rarity for me.
The other actor talked about the various jobs he’d been booked for earlier in the month, and the jobs he had coming up. When I told him I had only had two other jobs this year, he was stunned. I shrugged and said, “Most of the casting companies don’t like using trans people.”
He looked off into the distance. Thinking about the people he’d seen on sets. Then he nodded.
In 2025 it seemed like there were more trans people in the industry. In 2026 that’s not the case. I was in a group of 400 extras, and I was looking closely for other people who could be “Clocked” as trans. This day my “Transponder” wasn’t going off.
“Why don’t you just not tell them you’re trans?” he asked.
Ah yes. If only I could go back to 2018. Back then I let the casting companies believe that I was an actor “Willing to portray” a trans character. And it’s interesting how one casting company had no problem working with me when they thought I was just some actor willing to wear a dress for a paycheck. When I told them that I’m trans and didn’t want to play male roles anymore, they stopped working with me for six years (Now they book me precisely once a year just to deflect the discrimination accusations).
I think the trans shootings in 2025 might have made some companies afraid to blatantly discriminate against trans people. Ordinary office workers were suddenly afraid that an enraged trans person would show up with a rifle and massacre the staff.
But the heat has died down now. It’s been about five months since a trans shooting, and most people assume they can safely go to work without being ax-murdered by a trans activist. At least until the end of Pride Month.
May ended up being even busier than I had thought. I was also booked by a mid-sized casting company on a TV show. This casting company is one of the one’s I’ve taken to court over this. The case is still plodding through the legal system three year later, but this one company is making gestures of good faith by booking me more than once a year.
The two biggest casting companies, “Capital Casting” and “Garret Wiley Casting” are making comical attempts to pretend they haven’t blacklisted me. Last week I received an email informing me that my case against Garret Wiley Casting was assigned to a new investigator at the NYC Commission On Human Rights. Exactly 23 hours later I had a job offer from Garret Wiley.
It turned out to be my SECOND apocalypse in two months! This time a mysterious cosmic phenomenon was killing people all over New York. As always, it hit a photogenic landmark. Instead of Chinatown, this one picked Coney Island. We filmed on location, you might see me slumped in my seat on the Wonder Wheel as it tragically spins by the camera.
Between shots, the other dead bodies talked about what projects they had been on lately. This had been a good streak for me, four days of work in two months. But some of the other corpses had been getting four days of work in a single week.
I consoled myself with the hope that I was likely to be in Time Square running from zombies in another month or so.
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