Wednesday July 09, 2008
Rogue'ishly blonde
June was pretty dead since the May Table for 3 shoot. In June the closest thing to a gig I had had been one interview for a Featured Background role I did not get, but as the interview fell on a Sunday it was not a big deal not getting it; I was one of three and they selected one of the other two.
I was pleased to receive word on the eighth that I was booked on True Blood, a new cable television series I later learned would begin to air in the fall. During the first bit on set, I accurately figured it would be HBO as one line I could hear had in it "the eff-bomb," as a producer friend of mine would call it.
I had a 7:30am calltime at the Hollywood Center Studios, where I'd worked on the Going for the Gold episode of The Suite Life With Zack and Cody and at which I'd had my wardrobe fitting for my McDonalds commercial. The hotline recording urged those booked to call back again later in case of most likely calltime changes. I nearly forgot and when I checked at around midnight, sure enough, many calltimes were pushed; mine had been moved to 9:30am along with most of the tavern patrons we were to portray.
Checking its IMDB entry, the only name in the cast I could quickly recognize was the friendly William Sanderson, who I first met on the set of his Indie film Stanley's Gig and across whom I've come numerous times at various commercial auditions.
Once on set I learned the barmaid was the lovely Anna Paquin, who I did not recognize at first, not only due to her being about 50 feet away, but for this role her being such a very wavey-haired blonde.
The majority of the day was spent in holding. Along with a friendly older fellow named John I was placed in the far back booth of the tavern/diner set. With a male character Anna Paquin has some brief lines we couldn't hear and she crossed out.
In holding I conversed with backgrounders named Rosemary, Deborah (leaving the following day for eight days for New York), Megan, and musician Robert, the latter of whom had been a regular backgrounder on the series as one of the tavern's busboys. The background wrangler was named Rachel, whom while I recognized that I'd worked with her before, she wasn't sure from where we might have known each other. Checking my reports later, I'm pretty certain it was the episode of Ghost Whisperer on which we both worked.
The new HBO series being about Louisiana vampires (more at its official website), this was a scene in the series's season finale, episode 12. Being set far enough away, we felt it would be unlikely I would be visible beyond being a blur. We had an early-broke lunch, and we were wrapped "at 5:30pm," though this was to time-compensate getting back to crew parking. We were really done around 4:45, and 5:30 was still well within eight hours anyway.
I had bused to crew parking in the morning to be shuttled to the lot, but as crew parking was farther away than the studio, I just walked north from there.

Official site: True Blood at hbo.com/events/trueblood: Lots of storyline background, photos and video clips...