Salon writer Cara Anna became a Bollywood extra through casting agents who stalk backpacker hostels in Bombay. She played many a blank, blond backup dancer, getting a taste of reverse exoticization (via Attempt to Be Hip):
[Casting agents] wait patiently… skimming over the dirty and the clearly stoned, looking for the freshest faces… Lonely Planet guidebooks in hand… Want to be in a film? Just get in this car…Westerners resemble certain Mexican laborers — picked up from street corners, without the proper work papers, by shady middlemen who keep a generous dose of a long day’s pay for themselves…I could… eavesdrop on actors complaining about Bollywood’s gay casting couch. Being foreign and assumed ignorant, I was harmless… I not only met stars but became a casting agent, a dancer, a pitch-making screenwriter, a documentary assistant and an aspiring film journalist, all in less than four months…
I met a man from New York who, knowing nothing about Bollywood, became a bodyguard for one of India’s biggest actors. He worked his new connections, appearing in runway shows, and made the Mumbai tabloids as the rumored new lover of a dimpled starlet.
She got her own stunt double for Kisna:
A slight young Indian man with a long, tangled, orange-blond wig pulled too close around his eyes. He had stubble on his chin, hairy legs under his skirt and heavy pancake makeup on his face and arms. I was quietly outraged…Giggling, [Antonia Bernath] described the audition for her role, where the director asked her not for a monologue, or even acting, but a series of Spanish soap opera-esque poses: sadness, jealousy, anger. “What’s my motivation?” wasn’t important, as long as her tears were pretty.
And she’s an extra in a ballroom dancing scene in The Rising, the film about this blog’s namesake rebellion:
Excited and wanting to stay on set, I led a small mutiny of women so we could also play soldiers, mustaches and all.
Sepia Mutiny: fighting for your right to cross-dress. Just go read the story. She slings dish like a sous-chef.
