What it Was Like to Be an Extra on ‘The End of the Tour’

I spent a day trapped in a small room with thirty-nine other twenty-somethings (and one really old lady), scarce food and water, and a general tone of disillusionment. I was an unpaid extra for "The End of the Tour".

Finding out via text on Tuesday evening that I needed to report for duty at 7:00 am the following day gave me no time to prepare either mentally or wardrobe-ally. What could barely be called instructions were simply: “7am call time, GVSU Mackinac Hall, dress 90s.” Luckily I had previously started stalking the production in very nerdy fashion. I had ordered the book on which the movie is based and was pretty well versed in the plot. I frantically googled “1996 street fashion” and basically copied the wardrobe from Empire Records as best I could from my own closet, pulling anything I thought might work for both myself and my sister.

We arrived on set promptly at 7:00 the next morning, called the number we were provided and spoke to a very confused Casting Assistant named Mike (but who would later be re-named “Snuggleupagus” by my sister). He didn’t seem to understand why we were calling him or why we were there at 7:00 rather than 8:00. Hadn’t we gotten the memo that the call time was pushed? We hadn’t. In fact, since we didn’t go through casting and had instead been invited by a very tight-lipped friend of a friend who assisted on the production, we weren’t on any lists that would result in memo-like emails. We were clueless. And not in an appropriately '90s sort of way.

The cherubic youngsters whose power lived in the walkie-talkies strapped to their barely post-adolescent hips basically told us to go away for an hour because there was nowhere to “put us” at the moment. So we did. But, you better believe I left a trail of snark in my wake.

And this is just the beginning of the story... check out the rest of the first installment of my story by clicking the link below.