The thing about being dead is that you really can’t breathe.
At least not noticeably — a major challenge when you’re playing a corpse and you’re coated in flour.
This is something Stephanie Masoner discovered when she was cast as a 9-year-old rape-murder victim on “NYPD Blue” last season.
“I was lying in a basement, and they had put all this flour all over me, to make it look like she was plastered after she’d been shot,” says the 23-year-old actress, who’s just under 5 feet tall. “It must have taken about an hour of lying in the same position, and one of the things I didn’t think of until I got there is that you can’t really breathe too heavily, because I didn’t want all this flour to be flying everywhere.”
Rick Millikan, casting director of “The X-Files,” experienced complications from the opposite problem — too much breathing — when he played a soon-to-expire scientist in his own series’ opener last fall.
Millikan’s character realized something was terribly amiss when he started sweating, shivering, and turning to Jell-O — harbingers that a fierce, long-clawed alien was about to burst out of him, leaving a gaping abdominal cavity.
“When I looked at my hand and saw it was gelatinous, I had to start breathing heavily,” Millikan recalls. “We did the scene over and over and over, and I almost hyperventilated a couple of times.”
Ah, the trials and tribulations of playing a victim in today’s ultra-realistic television world.
Whoever said that “dying is easy . . . comedy is hard” obviously hadn’t consulted those who have had to play dead, or nearly deceased, for hours at a stretch.
Though viewers may not see (or notice) their names in the credits, these people provide some of TV’s most vivid moments — in gore-prone series such as “The X-Files,” “NYPD Blue,” “ER,” “The Sopranos” and the recently departed “Homicide: Life on the Street.”
These roles involve careful casting (often, a few auditions) and sometimes grueling preparations — and provide colorful memories.
As for the people who play these parts, those in this piece include an octogenarian with a doctorate in psychology, a prop man who talks his way into speaking roles, a variety of professional actors, and Millikan of “X-Files,” who hired himself for a pragmatic reason.
“There was a dummy that we used in the feature film, and they didn’t want to spend the money on another dummy, so they needed somebody who looked like that (movie) dummy,” recalls Millikan. “All of a sudden, (creator) Chris Carter looked at me, and said, `You look like him.”‘ (Millikan, who had no actual lines, sweated, shivered, and panted until that alien birth. Then, the hollow-chested dummy took over.)
Mostly, though, people take these roles for the exposure, the fun and, obviously, the money. According to the Screen Actors Guild, the current pay scale for “background actors” who don’t speak is $95 a day. One line or more, considered a “principal” role, raises the minimum pay to $576 a day. But one of the biggest incentives is the chance to rub elbows with influential actors, producers and casting people.
Occasionally, though, it all starts with connections.
Joe Badalucco, whose gory demise capped a multi-episode stint on HBO’s mafia hit “The Sopranos,” had been hired to do the props on the series, but talked his way into playing Jimmy Altieri — a presumed snitch.
In the season finale, Altieri was rubbed out. A later closeup revealed the hindquarters of a rat sticking out of his bloody mouth.
“The prop master on the job was going crazy that day to find a real rat. He went all the way up to Carmel, N.Y., and he brought back a rat — a real, dead, stuffed rat — but it didn’t fit in my mouth,” Badalucco says, matter-of-factly.
Next, they tried a rubber rat, which didn’t look good. “So, we got these little mouse toys you give dogs, and we took the hair off them and glued it on the rubber rat,” Badalucco says.
Alas, this creation was still too big for his mouth, so the veteran prop man started trimming it. “This is like 4 o’clock in the morning. I’m dressed up as an actor, and I’m still doing the prop work,” says Badalucco, who has gotten speaking parts on many of the projects he has worked on.
It’s one thing to chew scenery — but a rat?
“It didn’t bother me,” Badalucco insists.
In terms of TV makeup stories, though, John Towey’s takes the cake.
In a memorable “X-Files” episode last season, Towey played a world-famous physicist who got kidnapped by bad guys. They took him to a power plant, strapped him to a torture bench, and infected him with a remote-controllable virus, which turned him into a mass of pulsating veins.
“I wound up screaming just a violent scream of pain,” he says.
Lesser men might have howled before the cameras rolled.
Towey — who won the part after reading for both Millikan and Carter — first had to have a plaster of Paris “life cast” made of his head. From that very thin latex pieces were constructed, then applied, in layers, to Towey’s temples and forehead, cheeks and neck, hands and arms.
“I finally got onto the ( torture) table after four hours in a chair, being made up by three different people,” Towey says.
The final layer of latex applied had veins, connected by tubing that dangled (out of sight) from the latex and ended in a series of bulbs, which could be worked by the team of makeup artists. “If you squeezed the bulbs, these veins would visibly pulse,” says Towey, who periodically had to leave the table so that his veins could be darkened with an ink-dispensing airbrush.
The 59-year-old actor — who studied at Chicago’s Goodman Theater School and has been acting since age 27 — has played characters with far more “internal complications,” but never one with so complicated a makeup job.
“As I was doing this, I thought, `Wow. This is the strangest experience I’ve ever had in my entire life,”‘ Towey recalls.
On “X-Files,” Millikan casts the major guest roles, such as Towey’s, as well as those involving “under fives” (five lines or fewer).
Over on NBC’s “ER,” casting director John Levey casts any role that involves even “so much as a moan and groan.” He looks for people who “engender empathy” and, because the series is so frenetic, are “easy to remember.”
If a character is already suffering from rigor mortis, the role is generally cast by an outside agency specializing in extras.
“I’ll usually get something verbally from the director about type, age, ethnicity, whatever that scene calls for,” says Helen Mathis, a casting director with Hollywood’s Central Casting, which, among other shows, supplies “NYPD Blue” with dead bodies. “Usually, I’ll go ahead and cast the role, or they may ask me to see pictures.”
These dead bodies, Mathis says, are often important “story points” in an episode — which was the case with “Blue’s” 9-year-old murder-rape victim.
“They were very concerned about using a child, because they thought it would be too traumatic, so they wanted to hire an adult who was very small,” Mathis says.
She called Masoner, an actress who, at 4-foot-11, could pass for a child. “I went to an interview for it, and I was happy to get the job,” Masoner says.
Another “Blue” call was for an older victim, found dead with her hand and foot amputated and plastic over her head.
In this case, Mathis needed “someone who could handle” such a gruesome scene, so she called Blanche B. Hannifin. Now a full-time actress, she had long been an educational psychologist and Hollywood makeup artist.
“I thought to myself, a dead person just has to lie down and that’s it. But it was not that easy,” Hannifin says. “I had to be in a certain position, and they do a million takes. I was full of this fake blood. And every time they did a take, I had to cover my head with some kind of plastic material. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything. I was dead.”
Nonetheless, Hannifin says the actors and the crew were lovely. And she even got an unexpected bonus. Executive producer David Milch insisted that the director slip her a $100 bill. “I almost fainted,” Hannifin says.
Despite all that flour, Masoner even calls her “Blue” job “really fun,” as well as a great credit.
“Anytime you’re working hand in hand with good directors and actors, it’s a good learning experience,” Masoner says. “If you do a good job, I think everyone remembers you. And how many times are you going to play a dead person?”
