A Real Knowhere Man

I was a bit player on the set of “The Biggest Movie in the Whole World”

By John Griswold

July 31, 2025

Essays

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In 2021, my actor friend Larry suggested my younger son find work during COVID as a commercial actor or print model. It was easy work and good money for college, Larry said. He still got residuals from commercials he had done years earlier. My son was not interested, but I got curious about the film and commercial markets in St. Louis and looked at some sites.

Soon after that, an algorithm sent me an ad from a casting agency in Atlanta. They were hiring extras (“background actors”) for the movie Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 [GotG3], about to start production, and were especially interested in veterans and people who were fit, had crooked teeth, were bald, or had other distinctive looks. Finally, I thought.

Actually I had never wanted to be in a movie, but I like experiences. The agency wanted to see applicants’ faces and “the outline” of their bodies, so I had my son shoot me standing in runner’s spandex by the washing machine and sent in the photos.

Weeks went by, and I figured I did not get the gig. But in the middle of December the agency wrote to say I was “a good type” for a “key set of scenes” and asked my availability. On January 17, 2022, I was told I got the job. On the 19^th, the agency told me to be in Georgia on the 24^th for a COVID test and for a costume fitting on the 26^th. I threw some clothes, my laptop, and a couple of books in a bag and drove down through southern Illinois, past Nashville, through the mountains to Atlanta, then south of the city, to Fayetteville, Georgia, where the movie was being shot.

Larry and I talked on the phone about what I could expect. All I wanted was to see something cool, but he said to brace myself: I might end up sitting in front of a green screen for two weeks with other extras, reacting to people holding tennis balls on sticks, and never see any movie stars or even know what the scenes were about until the movie came out.

“I hope they don’t ask me to do something embarrassing on camera,” I said, “or to wear some fake head that smothers me 12 hours a day. The agency asked in an email if I would mind wearing prosthetics, and I felt like I had to say yes.”

“They’re not going to ask you anything,” Larry said. “They’ll tell you to do something and if you don’t comply you’ll be gone that day. Extras aren’t actors.”

He was salty because the independent films he had acted in had only won an award at Tribeca and premiered at Sundance. I was going to be in a major Hollywood motion picture.

•  •  •

Guardians might have seemed like an odd choice for me. I do not watch many “schwing-schwing” movies, as I have called them since the Lord of the Rings trilogy came out on DVD and filled our house with Dolby sword-fighting noises and death screams as I tried to grade a Lonely Mountain of student papers.

The Guardians series is also part of the MCU, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and me and Martin Scorcese are just alike: we do not care for superhero movies much. Growing up, I rarely read comic books, which the movies were adapted from, and when I did they were mostly my sister’s hand-me-down Richie Rich and Scrooge McDucks.

But my family and I loved the first movie, Guardians of the Galaxy (2014). We were already fans of Chris Pratt in his doofus role on the series Parks and Recreation, where he was half of the weird but beloved couple that he and Aubrey Plaza ambitiously created out of supporting roles. Guardians made Pratt a huge star a year before Parks and Rec ended.

Scorcese’s gripe about Marvel, he told Empire magazine, was this: “It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”

I was happy for Pratt that the first Guardians did allow him chances for this. The three movies in the series have a lot of schwing-schwing violence, explosions, screaming, aliens, melodrama, and rocket-ship chases, but they also have a good sense of humor and some authentic emotion.

Pratt (as Peter Quill, the protagonist for much of the series) says that when he looks at his comrades, who will eventually triumph over evil and become the Guardians of the Galaxy, he sees “losers—I mean, like, folks who have lost stuff. And we have, man, we have, all of us—our homes, our families. Normal lives.”

He delivers the speech not as some inhuman superhero with an “origin story,” but as the former boy afraid to take his mother’s hand as she died of cancer, even though she begged him to do so. When he ran from the hospital in horror and grief, he was immediately abducted—shrieking, “Mom!—by men hired by his father, whom he had never met. The end of the movie flashes back to her death to offer him some redemption and absolution.

The chief abductor, a hillbilly space pirate named Yondu (Michael Rooker in blue makeup and snaggleteeth), refuses to carry out his task and instead serves as a father figure to Quill, eventually sacrificing himself to that ideal in the second movie of the series.

The first Guardians movie could be seen as Quill coming to terms with his mother’s death; the second is a reckoning with what a real father means or does. I told my boys, as I headed out to be an extra in the third movie, that I hoped to be made up to look like some cousin to Yondu, the character I like best, and that they could start referring to me as “Johndu.”

•  •  •

Trilith Studios is the largest production facility outside Hollywood, with 32 soundstages on 700 acres. After 10 hours on the highway I drove around the property, lost, looking for the COVID testing tent. The test was done in seconds.

I got a cheap motel room in Fayetteville, six miles from Trilith, and worked there for two days. I ran a bit and did pullups and pushups in the evening—you never knew when director James Gunn might be ready for my close-up—then showered and ate roast chicken, salad, apples, bananas, and yogurt I bought from the supermarket and kept in the mini-fridge to save money. Morning coffee was from a Dunkin’ Donuts next door.

Wednesday I went back for my fitting. It took a while to fill out tax forms online, then I was buzzed in a mantrap gate and stood in the cold waiting for a production assistant (PA) in a golf cart. We drove a quarter mile on sidewalks through the freezing weather to a warehouse filled with racks of clothing: lots of stuff that looked like it came straight from Goodwill, fleece long johns printed with odd digital patterns, and leather coats, belts, and gauntlets in the style of Peter Quill. Well-used boots and shoes hung in bags on the racks or were lined up under them in pairs.

Only half a dozen people were working, supervised by a free-roaming Airedale named Mark Sanchez. After another wait I was taken to a back room by a middle-aged man in dreads and an X hat. Printouts taped to the walls showed the movie’s character types, including blue-faced, yellow-faced, pink-faced, and various prosthetic-headed alien races. Each type was assigned a name or number.

The man, Ira, took some measurements. He evaluated me, exactly as you might imagine a designer would, then left for several minutes. When he came back he had put together only one outfit for me to try: tanker boots, at least a full size too small, with shin guards glued to them; gray overalls with the front flap hanging down; a thin mesh hoodie, tight in the neck; a textured brown sweater that hung to mid-thigh and had big corrugated sleeves; a backpack of dubious utility; and a leather shoulder rig with straps that looked like it was meant to hold credit cards, not weapons. Ira tried a small hood but liked a giant, faux-leather monk’s cowl on me better.

I still had some hopes I was a Ravager, one of Yondu’s pirate gang, but I was to be Knowhere Citizen #65, I learned. (My pay stub read “Humanoid.”) I did not remember what a Knowhere was, other than a place that got blown up twice in the first two movies. (It is, of course, the severed head, the size of a moon, of an ancient celestial giant, floating in space, which has been mined for centuries for organic goo and now serves as an immigrant colony and headquarters for the Guardians.)

I did not want to be trouble, but I expressed mild concern that the leather credit-card holders and slim-fit pants made me look like the guy who folds sweaters at the Gap on Knowhere. Ira good-naturedly explained, no doubt for the thousandth time that month, that Knowhere was rebuilding after being destroyed, and, “It’s not all about guns. Every little part makes the whole.”

Ira’s boss came to the door as he was taking continuity photos of me: front, two profiles, back; hood up, hood down.

“Let me see your head,” she ordered.

I intuited she was the Edith Head of the movie and would decide if I wore my hood up or down the whole time I was there. I did not want to be too warm on set, and if I did make it on screen I hoped my face would not be obscured. I tried to make my head fascinating. She evaluated me, sagittal crest to lug soles.

“Hood down,” she told Ira and walked out.

I was done for the week. My off days, when I was not paid—five in this week alone—were the most expensive part of my adventure. Hourly rates for non-union extras fluctuated with regular pay, overtime, or a kind of super-overtime, but in the end I was able to have the experience and pay for my gas there and back, as well as 19 days of motel rooms and dinners. The background work was really for extras who lived in the Atlanta area and did not have to pay for a motel. Some of them told me it was the only work they did, and they were able to do it frequently, in films and streaming series such as She-Hulk and The Walking Dead. But everyone was excited to be on GotG3.

“This is the dream job; this is the one you want,” a young guy would tell me. “It’s literally Star Wars.”

When I got back to my motel I walked over to Dunkin’ Donuts and bought four donuts and another large coffee with cream and sugar. Now that I knew I would be wearing a bulky costume, there was no need to try so hard.

•  •  •

As the first day of shooting (our scenes) approached, emails from the casting agency started sounding frantic. Monday, August 4^th, was to have been a 6 am start, but on Sunday night the agency kept moving the time back, until I would need to be up at 3 am.

“Get some sleep!” they insisted. They added we could be “scruffy” with facial hair and that they were looking for volunteers to shave half their heads.

“WE WANT YOU TO LOOK COOL!” they shouted in the emails. (There were 170 extras on this Guardians, and agency employees were no doubt kept busy. That sounds like a lot of extras, and it was, relatively, but GotG3 employed 2700 people.)

I did a rapid COVID test at 3:30 am in a drive-through site at Trilith, staffed and organized like a CDC facility. On leaving it I got lost, drove to the wrong gate, was turned away, waited in traffic at a second gate that I decided was also a mistake, pulled out of line and drove miles around the perimeter of a large forest, got back in the same line, and was through the correct gate just after 4:30. Shuttle buses picked us up from our cars in a big gravel lot at a distance from the soundstages and drove us to a complex of interlocking party tents with a hand-lettered sign out front that read, “Planet Pez.” I did not know what the candy had to do with it.

We stood in line in the cold and then inside Planet Pez to sign in, and our phones were locked up in Faraday bags so we could not leak photos or give away plot points. Then we stood in line at a second COVID testing station and helped ourselves to coffee and pre-breakfast snacks from the craft services table, where the young attendant told me he had failed his English class and dropped out of college. (Days later I assured him, “You can always go back.” He: “I’ll never go back.”) We waited again in the entryway to go to wardrobe.

Communal dressing rooms, one for men and one for women, were curtained off deeper in Planet Pez for wardrobe changes. They had lockers to hold street clothes, and production photos of the extras on boards outside. Everything was well organized. Our costumes were hanging neatly, with the boots hanging with them in mesh onion sacks. PAs were there to help us dress and had continuity sheets that showed to the last detail how a costume was meant to look. These were enforced strictly. There was, however, nowhere to sit, which drew complaints from another extra, a little person in his 70s with a heavy Georgia accent behind his COVID mask.

In my own chilled fatigue I looked around and asked a PA if we were meant to just drop trou. Yes, citizens just dropped trou. When you were dressed in costume you called out your number, like an inmate, for inspection: “Number 65, boss!”

After the costume check, I was sent hobbling in my cold boots down hallways to Makeup, where I checked in again with a young PA who made it a point to learn every person’s name there. She pointed to brightly-lighted makeup and hair stations, 15 rows with four chairs each, and I was guided to a chair, where a makeup artist checked my sheet. A printout on her credenza said Knowhere citizens needed to look “dirty, messy, and greasy,” as if they had not bathed. They were rebuilding, after all.

Some extras who wore full prosthetics were in the chairs for an hour and a half every morning, for which they got extra pay, but my makeup took five minutes. Brown stain was sprayed on my head and hands, scrubbed in with alcohol and cotton balls, and daubed with powder or sprayed with sealant. Makeup artists seemed to gravitate to the horny bump on the left side of my forehead. One artist, who was from the UK and had tattoo sleeves, told me he had been flown in from London to work on “a major star.” He was impatient to use his skills on a citizen but was interested in trying a new “experimental” filth on me.

“Grimace,” he said and applied his stuff. When I relaxed my face, its lines and wrinkles had been emphasized by contrast.

After another wait in the entry, and another inspection by higher-ups in Wardrobe, we boarded a bus for another tent with plastic sides, which I estimated to be 2,400 square feet. This was called the holding tent and was where we would sit at long folding tables, sometimes all day, or until we were needed at the soundstage a short walk away. Hot breakfasts and lunches were served in the holding tent too; a well-stocked crafty always offered snacks, water, and sodas.

This would be our routine for two weeks, but everything in it was new to me then, for which I felt unexpectedly grateful. How many experiences do we get to have, as adults, that are completely alien?

•  •  •

That first morning, the holding tent was freezing, as it had only one foil duct blowing hot air from an external heater. A few extras managed to huddle around it after breakfast from the buffet—eggs, sausage, French toast, biscuits and gravy, grits, cold cereals, fruit, coffee, tea—but some who did not wore lightweight, short-sleeved costumes and were genuinely miserable. A big Mongol-costumed kid stood shivering in the cold and rain outside the trailer toilets. He claimed he was not cold, but when I asked if he was wearing long underwear, he said, “It’s just this,” and looked down at his bare arms, purpling and goose-pimpled.

There was no way to know when the waiting would end, and no indication anyone was working on more heat. After 30 minutes I decided not only that I would never extra again, but I also might not make it through the week. An assistant wheeled in a big library cart with prosthetic monster heads on it, but it did not make me feel better at all.

I introduced myself to the other extras who had chosen to sit at our table. All of us were older than the tent average. Tom, a veteran, was the most spectacular in his full-head, blue monster mask shaped like driftwood, with little raptor feathers on top, and freaky contacts in his eyes. The effect was so startlingly photorealistic that I realized many of the characters I had seen in the movies had not been digitally enhanced. You could have introduced Tom to anyone you knew, and they would be forced to think, deep down, for a split second, that he really was that thing.

Jeanine had an MA and taught theater at a community college in Florida. She had been issued an earth-toned costume as plain as a postulate’s, which worked with her close-cropped, iron hair and eyes like an activist nun’s. (Later she told me her aunt was a nun who served as a chaplain for the Denver police and rode along on rough calls.) She became my main friend in the holding tent.

Brandon, also a vet, started off as a grunt, he said, but became an officer by going to law school through the military. He said he was on his third career and had just finished making a feature film he financed with a half-million of his own money—and had gotten distribution, which was the hard part. He made the film in part as a write-off, because he had planned to open a second location for another business he owned, but COVID prevented that, and his accountant said if he did not do something else with all that money the feds would tax him. Brandon called himself a “so-called, self-made millionaire.” He lived in Pennsylvania, had worked as an extra in New York, and wanted most of all to be a known actor and director. By 9 am it was revealed he loved to sing, badly, in public.

Extras walked around in the tent, looking at each other’s costumes and makeup. One person had a head like a brush fire, another, an amniotic sac. A young White woman in a grotesque prosthetic head and her own glasses kept her face lifted for dramatic effect as people walked by. She talked so loudly that when she imitated someone shouting, her voice went down in volume. She danced in place, gave booty bumps to passersby, and provided the soundtrack for the tent with her talk. Eventually she found the only other one of her kind, another woman with the same limited-edition head, and they started dancing together, twerking, booty bumping, cocking their heads, and pumping their fists in unison. The first woman scanned the crowd through her glasses to be sure she was being seen.

I found that if I pulled both my hoodie and my hood over my head, hugged myself in my chair, and put my forehead on the plastic table, I could stay just warm enough to silently cuss Crazy Larry for being right.

•  •  •

But if I had ever wanted to spend only one day on the set of a major motion picture, this was nearly the perfect one.

Mid-morning, production assistants walked us to a Props hut outside the holding tent. Props masters reached back and grabbed a piece of junk they thought was proper for each of us to carry around. The thinking was very much like the military’s: you were meant to check out the exact same piece of junk every morning, be accountable for it during the workday, have it with you at all times, and return it safely to Props every night.

Each person’s assigned junk was as inexorable as fate, since it was chosen for that extra and could not be swapped or left out later, due to continuity. One young man costumed like a Mongol blacksmith got an inflated inner tube; a young woman named Victoria got a long pipe with rings around it and a wrench head on the end. Later I asked if she would be relieved not to have to carry it anymore.

“I didn’t like it at first, didn’t know what it was,” she said. “But now I have my little thing, and I love it!”

I was given what looked like an army duffel bag that was really a rectangle of greasy canvas pinned into the shape of a tube with rusty, sharp wires. The tube was stuffed with a cardboard box and rags that sagged into one end and made the thing unwieldy.

Then we were taken down to the Guardians soundstage and in through the elephant door. At first I saw only construction equipment and tools, scissor lifts, hanging sheets of plastic, electrical cords, pieces of fake walls, disused lights, and industrial HVAC units overhead. A few steps further and we were on a dirt path to the downtown square of Knowhere, which was surrounded by multi-story buildings—part New Orleans, part Kowloon—that held an arms room, jail, restaurants, bars, and stacked housing. The set had a more cartoonish Blade Runner vibe, still lots of neon and urban grit, and smelled distinctly of burning glycol from the fog machines.

The set rose at least five stories overhead. I thought skylights were providing natural light, but of course those were more studio lights behind a white veil under the ceiling. Everything was controllable. The setting sun was a spotlight behind the jail, dimmed by dust from the courtyard and manufactured mist. The upper halves of most buildings were digital blue screens with registering marks and identifying letters and numbers, which could allow flames, or anything else, to be added in post-production.

Industrial junk lay scattered around artfully. The concrete was crumbling but was wood covered with plaster; blast shutters looked as if they weighed several tons but did not. A mud-hole wrangler—a young guy in a vest with a pump sprayer—made rounds keeping puddles fresh. A woman sprayed watery “rust” to make “metal” girders look decrepit.

Three women circulated frequently among extras with FX contact lenses to administer eye drops. Tom took a knee to make it easier for them. They were careful not to smudge makeup on the blue people, pink people, and yellow people. Prosthetic artists also visited, fussed over their head creations, and took photos for their portfolios.

Crew and PAs wore ear buds and walkie talkies and could hear what was going on behind the scenes. They were everywhere, often running to fill higher-ups’ demands—the movie’s cinematographer ruled by fiat, eg—fiddling with the set, and talking in pairs and groups, but they fled at the noise of certain bells. There was some mix-up over Drax the Destroyer’s knives; Props had three of them, but no two matched, and they were working on the problem.

Everyone knew what they were doing but me. Key places on the set had nicknames: Sbarro (a restaurant deck), Amazon (a bank of mailboxes), The Boot of Jemiah (a bar and casino), the distillery (the false wall of a factory with culvert pipes), the dumpster (a dumpster, but important). I had never been told of these.

I did not know about Pez, until another extra, a six-and-a-half-foot man dressed like a Viking with long hair, pointed him out as the guy in a Miami cap and down vest. The Viking explained there were so many extras that the usual Second AD (assistant director) was tasked with scheduling, and a “second” Second AD, Pez, was hired to manage us in person. The Viking went head-to-head with his buddy, a long-nosed dude in chop bangs, at the appearance of some white-haired man I did not recognize. This was James Gunn, the director.

No one had explained what extras could do (choose their own movements to some extent) or could not do (complain or speak to the big names). No one ever said not to look into a camera lens or try to steal a scene. (Of course I knew better than that.) I did not know that most of the main actors were on site. I did not know what determined the length of workdays, or how often water or pee breaks might happen. I did not know yet the tricks some extras used to get on set when it was not their turn, or how many took leftover meals and crafty snacks home to live on as part of their pay.

We stood around for an hour as Gunn talked things over with his cinematographer, Henry Braham, and were finally organized by Pez. He decided who would walk across the town square in this scene, who would sit, and who would stand on a crosswalk overhead. A woman wearing an odd fleece onesie like I saw in Wardrobe was standing-in for a digitized character that turned out to be Groot, the sentient tree in the movie. She sat down on stairs facing the public square, and a PA brought out a waist-high Rocket the Raccoon doll and put it next to her.

I was put on a porch next to the Knowhere armory with a blue kid who was White but reminded me of Michael Jackson; Brandon the vet; and a guy wearing the same sweater as me, who looked like John Rhys-Davies, Indiana Jones’ Egyptian sidekick, but wanted to be called “Slammer.”

“Slammer?” I said.

“Like Slammer the Hammer,” he said. I did not know who that was. Slammer had a business arranging for trucks to deliver fresh fruit and veg to restaurants in the city. Much of it was done on the phone, so the downtime of background work usually benefitted him, he said. On GotG3, he was denied use of his phone. Many extras complained, and some tried to cheat.

The four of us were opposite the action being filmed, for “when Pez needed us,” his PA said. The camera pointed at a round, golden guy in a caftan who stood glowing in the fake sun, like a statue, as extras moved around him, and kid actors pretended to play with steel cubes in the dirt in the square. Then a huge, motorized cherry-picker with balloon tires showed up, its long boom in six collapsing sections with a camera in a Steadicam unit at the tip. The operator stood next to the machine and pointed the camera at the Groot and Rocket stand-ins.

Gunn called for “playback”—Radiohead’s “Creep” played over loudspeakers—and “action,” and the cameras shot extras milling around fake Groot and Rocket. A producer walked past me just then with a portable monitor that showed the camera’s view in real time. The extras were just legs and butts, but the vivid, saturated look of the movie was already there.

The idea was for the boom camera to pull back from fake Groot, and he would walk across the square, hang dog, while the music played, “But I’m a creep / I’m a weirdo / What the hell am I doin’ here? / I don’t belong here….”

All this took hours, and I stood in one place the whole time, arms crossed and leaning on a wall to help support my weight, since we had not been told we could sit.

A man and a woman appeared and began painting the girders of the porch with red lead, five feet in front of me. The woman danced to “Creep” as they pretended to work. I thought they were extras, until the woman said, “Come on, Drax, why don’t you dance?” and I realized they were stand-ins for Drax (Dave Bautista) and Mantis (Pom Klementieff).

“Only stupid people dance,” fake Drax said. Fake Groot walked sulkily behind him in the direction of the Boot of Jemiah.

I understood in a flash this was scripted dialogue, and my directorial eye saw that the camera would have to reverse and point at them—and, more importantly, me. Sure enough, the real Drax and Mantis replaced their stand-ins—Bautista smaller than he looked on screen—and Henry Braham devised a shot for which he would pluck the camera from a wheeled cart as it pulled back from Groot sitting on the stairs, use it as a handheld unit to approach Drax and Mantis as they spoke, walk onto the porch, spin nearly on my toes, and follow Groot up the dirt road.

They did eight takes, and no one objected to my presence, or should I say acting? This was it, my star turn: the man walks in the room, that bag is filled with money. When Braham approached me, surrounded by cable-pullers and safety-guiders, looking down into the camera at his knees and seeing me in his viewfinder, I was gazing heroically to one side, though I wanted real bad to look into the camera’s hypnotic eye. Also, I was worried he or his crew would step on my aching feet.

After eight takes, James Gunn said over the loudspeakers, “Let’s try something else,” and it was something else that made it into the movie. Obviously I was appreciated, though, because Pez gave me and Tom “walk-throughs” of the crowd in subsequent takes that also did not make the final cut, but it did make some of the other extras jealous.

(The next day Pez announced that an extra had been “upgraded.” I did not know what that meant. It meant he got lines, was slated for six scenes, would earn union scale, and was eligible for full SAG membership. Brandon whispered to no one in particular, “Once in a blue moon.” A young guy sitting nearby said he got upgraded too, but it turned out to be for a single line in another show.)

The real Nebula (Karen Gillan) was on set too but did not have her black contacts in and was not seething, so I did not recognize her. She came dancing over to Pom Klementieff, and they laughed and hugged. (Gillan is known for constantly lifting castmates’ moods on set.) The real Cosmo the Spacedog was there, a chew toy in its mouth, excited. The real Kraglin (Sean Gunn, the director’s brother), Yondu’s first mate, was quietly talking to extras; I wanted to tell him I was a fan. Later, Chris Pratt could be heard shouting, at a distance, “drunk” in the Boot of Jemiah.

After noon we got a short break. (There were not many breaks, and I wondered if reduced water intake purposely kept bathroom breaks to a minimum.) Lunch was more than two hours after that, and then only because Pez had a fit on his cell at someone who had failed to order the catered food.

“It’s only the biggest fucking movie in the whole world!” he shouted to his PA good-naturedly.

After lunch, to 7:30 pm, we shot three scenes, with many takes each, of extras walking and posting up around the square. For a long while I sat tuckered out with the Vikings and Tom, whatever he was, outside the jail and got up only to pretend to look for something in the rubble. To change things up, I walked over to a takeout stand and pretended to order from the young Puerto Rican extra who had installed herself in the window as proprietor. After several takes she offered me mochi or a plastic grub from the bowl she pretended to be eating from. Miming speaking, we enthused that it was not too bad. On about the 15^th take, she offered, and I said out loud, “GIMME that bowl,” and took it. She laughed. That brought Tom over.

It was weird, talking to him, with his alien eyes looking back at you. The latex mask had been applied in eight pieces, so it conformed to his facial expressions and laughter. He wore coveralls like a flight suit and had broad shoulders and the start of a belly. His Georgia accent was very heavy. His respectful, wry way of speaking from the mask intrigued the woman at the stand, and he knew to be deadpan when she laughed at how he was freaking her out.

I asked how old a man he was under all that; he said 49. He went in the Air Force in 1991, at 17, and went on so many deployments after 9-11 that he had lost count. He also did a seven-country tour, twice. Now he was both a civilian employee of the military and a reservist. He said they were dangling more advancement, but he half-wished they would not offer. He kept saying how tired he was. He had inherited 180 acres near Macon from his granddad, who left it to him because he would not sell it. He raised Tennessee Walkers and beef cattle there and slaughtered some of his own cattle.

Tom said he was not surprised Dave Bautista did not look as huge in person. He said TV made all those guys seem bigger than they were; he had seen The Undertaker, though, and he was huge. I told him about Leapin’ Lanny Poffo, a young lithe guy on the wrestling circuit in Southern Illinois when I was a kid, who climbed turnbuckles and leapt onto his opponents. Lanny was successful enough that he got big and had to stop using “Leapin’.” Tom and the woman laughed.

Tom started looking into a bucket at her window, repeatedly, and he cleaned the takeout shelf several times with his hand. I said you could always tell somebody was prior service because they could never leave things alone, and he said he looked in buckets because you never knew if they had something in them that would go boom. He looked sad in his prosthesis and said when he was in Iraq it was bad, real bad.

Tom and others with “A” makeup (full prosthetics) were allowed to leave early, because they took an hour or more to remove. Pez told the rest of us to improv anything the last couple of takes. I studied takeout signs, walked to a metal-junk cart, weaved among the crowd, and stopped in the square to give the setting sun a cunning, half-dumb look, like Yondu would give.

I had gotten about all I had hoped for on my first day, and there was more to come. I got changed in Wardrobe, waited to be checked out at several levels, then caught the shuttle bus to my car. I had to stop at a Walgreens for a prescription refill and “91 percent or better” isopropyl alcohol, which a makeup artist had told me would be needed to clean my dirty, messy, greasy face and hands. The pharmacist was uneasy at my appearance, but I tried to project I was just a good citizen on his way home.

To be continued….