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"So, ladies, how many of you are prostitutes?" @ 12:32 am
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puritybrown:I am bone-tired because I got up early (for me, anyway) this morning and took the 18 bus to Drimnagh Castle, where I filled out a form, joined a group of similarly anticipatory people, sat down in front of a mirror, had my hair teased and sprayed and stuffed under a cap, had my face and hands daubed with cosmetic dirt, got dressed in a white petticoat, long, thick, heavy black skirt, white blouse and grey shawl (which proved on closer examination to be half of a towel that had been ripped along the diagonal), and spent several hours nattering with the others who were there, eating lunch (spaghetti and meatballs, and chocolate cake), and reading...
...and then we all got herded to where the cameras and crew were set up, and we spent (I think -- I didn't have my watch) two and a half hours standing in the general vicinity of some cameras, under rain and sunshine, nattering to each other for most of it and standing and/or moving in our set positions when we were told to.
All of which is to say: I have spent a day as an extra on The Tudors! It was rather fun. There was a lot of hanging about doing nothing in particular, but when it came time for me to take up my position, the extras-wrangler[1] said to me, "Okay, you're a butcher's wife," and led me to a waist-high treestump with a pig's head[2] on it, set up next to a barrow that held four baskets of offal[3]. And having said over and over again to the other extras that of course the shot you're in might not get used, and if it does get used you might not be visible, and if you are visible it might just be your elbow or the edge of your skirt or some other non-identifiable part of yourself -- in sum, having reconciled myself to the idea that all of the palaver might not result in my being visible on screen, I was now going to be able to say "look for the woman with the cleaver and the pig's head! that's me!" Result.
(Also, I was standing behind some severed human heads[4] on pikes, and the main bit of business while I was cleaving the pig's head[5] was two young girls staring at the heads and being hastily drawn away by their mother, and I thought the director might be making a Point by having a butcher cleaving a pig's head in the same shot as two children staring at human heads. I thought that was quite clever, though of course it remains to be seen whether it comes across that way in the episode.)
Everyone involved was very nice, brisk and business-like; I sometimes had the disconcerting impression from the hair and make-up people that they were treating us like furniture, and it wasn't because they were rude or offhand, but because our own opinions were irrelevant; we had to look the way other people -- people we weren't even going to meet -- wanted us to look. This is not my typical experience of people who do my hair, and it was a slightly odd experience.
All in all, a good day. Tiring, though. I'm going to sleep for about fifteen hours now.
[1] probably not his official title
[2] real!
[3] also real! and very smelly! and got smellier as the day wore on!
[4] not real, and not very convincing-looking from where I was standing, but maybe they'll pass muster on TV
[5] but not too vigorously, because a) I didn't want to endanger my fingers and b) there was only one pig's head available for cleaving, so it was pretty important that the head should never actually get cleft.
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