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.
If anyone is interested this is also written about in the book Shantaram which is an excellent read (one of my favorites). Leopold is prominent in the book as meeting place for westerners and the mafia. The book rights were just bought by Johnny Depp (outbidding Russell Crowe) for 2 MM. Def check it out.
Rish and other book readers– Yeah, Shantaram seems like an amazing book. It is based on the real life of an Australian named Gregory David Roberts, and apparently he appeared in a Bollywood film while he was a fugitive. (That isn’t a major part of the book if you’re wondering, in Bombay he was mainly a doctor in the slums, but I remember finding about the Bollywood part on the internet somewhere).
i live in mumbai right now w/ five white people (i’m indian) and ALL of them get paid to be extras. one of them just made 1000 rupees for two hours of work, while another gets paid to just stand behind the bar at a club. i think the funniest was the tourism video for mumbai that one was in, only she said there were no indians in the video.