By Stephen Tulley (@Stephen_Tulley)
Readers of my previous post know that since I work as a background actor, stand-in, and precision driver in Hollywood I sometimes get the opportunity to work with actors or directors I admire. I consider those to be special and memorable days at work. But since I’m also a serious Fringie, I’m also always on the lookout for actors who had roles in Fringe. It’s a little game I play, much like the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, “How many actors have I worked with who were in Fringe?” Some of these predate Fringe, and others during the airing of the series, but here are my experiences with a great cast of actors.
Seth Gabel
As Season 4 of Fringe unfolded I kept thinking to myself that Seth Gabel looked really familiar, not just having appeared in previous episodes. About halfway through the season I had an epiphany… I had actually worked a scene with Seth on an unaired pilot back in 2006, it just took me that long to remember it!
Until recently networks often ordered a slew of pilots and then chose which ones to put to series, usually a fraction of what had been filmed. It was very expensive for the networks, but great for actors and crew members. There used to be a spring “pilot season” when it was not uncommon to work 12 hours days six days a week. That has all changed with the recession.
“Beyond” was a pilot for Fox that was never aired, but it centered on scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory building a probe to destroy a meteor hurdling towards earth containing deadly pathogens. Seth played one of the scientists and in one scene he walked around this device in the lab set looking at the other scientists (meaning me and bunch of other people) wearing white protective hazmat suites. And yes, even though we were on an air conditioned sound stage it was very hot in those hazmat suites.
And since this was in April 2006 we filmed the pilot during Passover and I remember one day production had set up a Passover table on stage for Seth, the producers, and other actors.
Jasika Nicole
It wasn’t until Fringe had been on for a couple seasons that in doing some research I discovered that I had worked a scene in yet-another unaired comedy pilot that Jasika starred in. The “Mastersons of Manhattan” was a multi-camera sitcom pilot for NBC that never got picked up. Here’s part of an early review from TheFutonCritic.com, a site which tracks and reviews pilots for TV:
“And last, but not least, there's Amanda's boy-trapped-in-a-girl's body daughter (apologies as I didn't recognize the actress) and Penny (Jasika Nicole), a nurse/struggling actress who's been taking care of the Mastersons' ill father while also carrying on a affair with Roger and plotting the Mastersons' downfall with her real lover - Bobby!”
My role was a juror in a courtroom, but the cameras were all behind all our heads, so we were just silhouettes on film. Unfortunately, I don’t remember if Jasika was in that particular scene. I should note that multi-camera shoots are very different creatures than single-camera shows like Fringe. It’s much more like theater. Shot almost entirely on sound stages there are usually four cameras rolling at one time. In traditional sitcoms, like “Mastersons,” all the scenes are rehearsed then filmed in sequence in front of a live studio audience. Current sitcoms sometimes contain pre-shot scenes, but those are aired on TV’s for the studio audience to understand the continuity of story.
As for background actors, when not rehearsing a scene we are holding up in the bleachers where the audience sits for the taping. So, for a full day I got to watch all of the scenes being rehearsed, both in front of me in person and on the TV’s above.
John Noble
I know that when the pilot of Fringe aired most people said, “Aha..that’s the actor who played Denethor of Gondor on Lord of the Rings.” I, on the other hand, said, “Aha…that’s the actor who played Russian Consul General Anatoly Markov on my episode of 24!”
While I would love to state that I worked a scene with John Noble, I can’t, but we did appear in the same episode of 24 and both our characters were connected in the storyline.
In 2006 I was cast to be *the* Secret Service Agent guarding ex-First Lady Martha Logan (Jean Smart) in episode 6.13 of 24 (6 p.m. – 7 p.m.) at her elite sanatorium. Her ex, former President Charles Logan (Greg Itzen) comes to ask her help contacting the Russian Premier’s wife as Jack Bauer has locked himself in the Russian Consulate and extracted information from the nefarious Markov (John Noble) but cutting off the tip of his finger with a cigar cutter.
In a fit of rage Martha stabs Logan in the neck and the Secret Service agents scramble to aide him. At the end of the scene you can hear the line, “Agent Tulley! Get in here!”
Sadly, it was two different sets of scenes filmed in two different locations on different days of the shooting schedule, but all for the same episode… There, but not there… Kind of like being in the other universe.
What irks me the most is not working with John in a scene together, although I did get to work with Jean Smart (which I consider an honor), but that the exterior shots of the Russian Consulate were filmed at Craven Estates…in my native city of Pasadena, California! I should also add that our director was Jon Cassar, who went on to direct 5.06 “Through the Looking Glass and What Walter Found There.”
Mark Valley
The John Scott character has always been controversial among Fringe fans, including the fact that in real-life Mark is Anna Torv’s ex. But for both seasons of the legal drama “Harry’s Law” he played attorney Oliver Richard for 22 episodes.
I’ll be honest with you…courtroom scenes are the most boring scenes to work! Unless you have lines you have to sit for hours on end listening to the same dialog over and over again, all the while looking alert and pretending to be hearing it for the first time. I got stuck in the visitor’s galley right behind Mark at the defendant’s table for one episode in which we filmed for 10+ hours a day for three straight days. And Mark had not one word of dialog.
So you might ask what do actors do in that case? Well, for Mark he texted a lot between takes up to the point when an AD would come up to him and state, “Uh, Sir? We are rolling now.” And then he hid his phone under the table until we cut.
Marcus Giamatti
In 3.04 “Do Shapeshifters Dream of Electric Sheep” Marcus portrayed our favorite conflicted shapeshifter Officer Ray Duffy. Not that long ago I was cast in a funeral scene for a very small independent movie “The Curse of Downer’s Grove” which according to the production notes has been completed but no information yet on releases.
I was asked by the director to step-in and fill the role of the pastor at the grave site. Since I didn’t get my hands on a call sheet I don’t know exactly what Marcus’ role was in the movie, but he was one of the mourners. But, this is what small-budget means: props didn’t have a bible, so one of the prop assistants spray painted one of her college text books and taped a cross on it for me to use.
It rained a lot that day so I’m sure many set-ups were cancelled or changed. Now on set I don’t normally chat-up the “first teamers” (aka, the lead actors) since they are there to work, and in fact every person on the set has a specific job to do, so most idle chat is done on lunch break or after wrap, but I appreciate his work so he is one of the cast members I would have approached and thanked him for giving us the shapeshifter who just wanted to live with his family.
Evan Bird
There are simply sometimes in the business when you show up to set and aren’t used. That was the case with the movie “Maps to the Stars” where I had been booked to be a traveler with my contemporary car. We were filming in the parking lot of historic Union Station in downtown Los Angeles and after the AD’s were going to have me drive through camera frame for this particular scene, they changed their minds. As we were broken to go to lunch at catering, I saw Evan Bird walk right by me chatting with one of the AD’s and my first thought was “Hey! That’s the kid, Aaron Sneddon from 4.03 ‘Alone in the World’ just taller!” Since I couldn’t get my hands on a call sheet I didn’t know how many scenes he had that day.
John Pyper-Ferguson
When episode 4.02 “One Night in October” aired I was happy to see John cast as “Dr. & Killer” John McClennan. If you read my previous post about DP Tom Yatsko you’ll know I stood-in on Brothers & Sisters for a couple seasons. John portrayed Joe Whedon, who was married to the character Sarah Walker (played by Rachel Griffiths) during this time. All those large Walker family scenes that were filmed in the first two seasons had at least 11 stand-ins, and many times I was sitting across a table or a couch from John waiting for my actor to arrive on set.
