Here are Parts I, II, and III of our deep-dive into the casting, costuming and prepping of Perry Mason’s background actor cast. 

A large collection of background actors voicing their objections to a case on the City Hall steps or finding themselves under the spell of Sister Alice at the Radiant Assembly in HBO’s Perry Mason aren’t just dressed, sent over to the set and told, “Okay, yell.” These are actors helping to tell a story. They’re directed.

That direction comes from the assistant director department (A.D.), whose job it is to translate the director’s vision for the scene and what the audience will experience from the background into real life. “Once they get to the set, that’s less my job and really that of the 1^st A.D.s and 2^nd A.D.s,” director Tim Van Patten explains.

Van Patten brought his longtime 1^st A.D., Julie Bloom, with him from New York, who had worked with him Boardwalk Empire.  “Julie does what we did on Boardwalk and The Sopranos, which is to dial in her whole department so that these extras become characters,” he explains.  

Bloom had to leave the show after the first several episodes for another project (replaced by 1^st A.D. Darin Rivetti), with 2nd A.D. Mollie Stallman continuing to do what she does best, and loves most – directing background.  

Stallman starts the process with “story hour.” “Before the background actors ever come to the set, I go and put myself in the middle of, say, the 400 people we have…and read through the scene they’ll be playing in,” she says. “I play all the parts. So even before they get onto the set, they knew what they’re in for and what acting skills they’ll be called on to use. I’m relaying to them what the director of the episode is hoping to achieve. And I put the acting in their hands. I treat them as actors and give them the opportunity to act, and it turns out, boy, a lot of them can.”

“She’d read the scene and give us a little direction,” says background actor James Tappan. “’You’ll need to be very high energy there’ or ‘You’ll be quiet there.’ Just things like that, to add some texture to the scene. And then we’d go to set, and they’d give us a little more direction.”

“It’s really very helpful,” says background actor George Zaver. “If I’m a photographer outside the Courthouse, I need to know, who’s coming out of the court? Is it the girl who’s accused of murder? Is it Perry? It really informs what I’m doing, so I’m not just snapping away. I know the story, and I know why I’m doing what I’m doing.”

At the end of story hour and before moving to the set, Stallman will assign bits of business to everyone. “I can say, ‘Okay, gimme five press guys. Now, you guys are gonna be the ones closest to the stairs. Your job is to mob them as they come up,” Stallman says. “Or I’ll say, ‘You five lawyers, you’ll be behind our actors. Let them get out the door first and down those stairs. You don’t care about this. You have your own case to do, so you’re going home for the day, so you come out and then disperse left or right.’ So I try to establish what I think are the best things to do before they ever get to the set. Then, once they’re there, they know what they’re up against, and we can make adjustments.”  

Once that’s done, a gaggle of production assistants and A.D.s would “start the train,” moving the large group to set, section by section, 50 at a time. “That way, there’s not a big logjam of people shutting down a street in downtown L.A.,” 2nd A.D. Salvatore Sutera notes.

“She knows how to read the crowd,” says background actor Adyr Villavicencio.  “I would watch her, and she knew who to talk to, who’s there to make the scene work – and who was just in there for a day’s pay. She knew the difference.” 

Given the enormous number of players she had to instruct made her job all the more remarkable, Sutera explains. “You have to have the type of presence to be able to instruct people, both small and large masses, and give them sometimes limited but very detailed direction in the quickest amount of time. And Mollie is very good at telling them what she wants them to do—but also giving them the freedom to put their own life into it, as well.”

And instead of just “Walk from A to B and then back,” Stallman would take the time to give them each little scenarios to motivate their acting.  “They all had a role,” she explains. “I might tell someone, ‘You’re gonna buy some apples, and then you realize that this one is rotten. You’re gonna go back, and feel out a few more, and get a better one, and then go on.’ Or to one of the lawyer background actors, instead of ‘I just want you to walk down these stairs and across the street,’ I might tell him, ‘You were supposed to meet your wife for dinner, but your case ran late. You gotta hustle home, cause your mother-in-law will not put up with that.’”

Once the background is set, Stallman would run a rehearsal, to evaluate the setup. “Lemme watch one, and see what kind of mess I’ve made, and then we’ll make some changes,” she laughs. “We listen to the principal actors, and we hear how the actors are going to play their scenes, and how it will affect their relationship with the background actors, to help them sell whatever the actor’s trying to sell.”  The first few rehearsals are not just for the background’s sake, but for the camera team’s, as well. “The camera operators and the cinematographer can now see what it looks like with 200 bodies there that weren’t there a half an hour ago. And we want to make sure that we’re not blocking camera or getting in the way of the progress of the actors.”

Once the cameras roll, the background actors protesting on the City Hall steps as Perry and Della try to make their way up, discussing the case as they walk, are jeering at full volume. But with the two actors wearing FM microphones, trying to provide their lines clean to the production sound mixer, all that jeering has to go. So after a few passes, suddenly, all 225 of those background actors become mimes, appearing exactly like they did a take earlier, looking as if they’re shouting at the top of their lungs – but not.  Says Zaver, “All of a sudden, it’s like you’re watching a silent movie.”

Though it might seem like the production could skip the passes with the background yelling aloud, there is a reason they do it. “We’ll do several takes, where it’s loud. And you can’t hear the dialogue,” Stallman explains. “That’s actually for the background’s sake, so they can get in the groove of it, so they know what it feels like when we ask them to pantomime so that we can get clean dialogue. They know what the energy is—all they’re doing is not vocalizing it.” Without this full-throated run, the knee jerk method can often be something that doesn’t work so well onscreen. “The tendency is to overact. Because you’re being quiet, you feel like you’re not emoting as you should.  So you go a little overboard, to get across what you’re not actually able to express.  So a big piece of direction for that is ‘Less is more.’”

Being actors, the background performers also can’t help but come up with great business, even creating small “scenes” with adjacent actors. “There’s a lot of hand work, a lot of face working,” Adyr Vallavicencio explains.  “At City Hall, for instance, the girl next to me would punch my shoulder, and just pointing, so I had to react to her reaction. Whoever starts it, then you react to that more. Or Mollie might tell me, ‘We want you to look disgusted when Matthew [Rhys] comes up with the defendant,’ and then tell the girl next to me, ‘You need to act like you’re dramatically physical.’ She would give us good pointers. Because if the camera’s going to be close to you, you don’t want to be doing two separate things. When someone’s trying to interact with you, you just go with it.”

Indeed, treating the background performers like actors, and not simply as placeholders, was something that was key to the whole directorial team, starting from the top down.  “The extras are a part of this painting,” Van Patten says. “They need to be embraced as artists. Because inside of every one of those extras is an actor, and you have to tap into their best selves, as performers.” Stallman agrees. “One of the things that I always address is to never forget that they’re actors. Often they’re aspiring actors, or performers trying to stay connected to the TV/film scene, and this is how they can continue to hone their craft and be part of the process. And it’s absolutely key to respect that and never forget it.  If you do that, you’ll get the very best performance out of every one of them.”

All of this effort, involving hundreds of people, is there simply to create the illusion of 1932 Los Angeles, even if the background actor is seen only in passing. And that’s the difference between good background and bad. “You don’t know good background until you’ve seen it bad,” Stallman notes. “It’s distracting. You see the lady in the green dress who’s gone by five times because she’s just been told to walk around in circles. But when they’re good, then you feel like you’re watching real life. We’re trying to achieve a life that feels so normal that you don’t pay attention to it. It may seem counter-intuitive for somebody who wants their work to be noticed, but if you’re doing it right, then it’s so natural that it’s unnoticeable. That’s good background.”

Featured image: Camera operator Don Devine lines up a shot of Matthew Rhys (Perry Mason) and Gayle Rankin (Emily Dodson) in the Courtroom set on Paramount Stage 27, as background cast performs behind them. The best background are ones audiences don’t even notice, Mollie Stallman notes. Photo by Merrick Morton/HBO.

In Part I of our deep dive on the extras—properly known as background actors—in HBO’s Perry Mason, costume designer Emma Potter’s revealed just how much work goes into the wardrobes of folks we often only see on screen for only a matter of seconds. Potter’s approach to the design of the costumes for Perry Mason’s background actors was based on both her research and the sense of Los Angeles in 1932 that she got from reading the scripts for the first time. “You could tell that our main characters were so very closely woven into the tapestry of the people around them and the city they were in,” she says.  “My first talks with Tim [Van Patten] were about the idea of the city itself as a character. He wanted a visceral sense of what it was like to live and be in L.A. at this time. It was a very uncomfortable time, and he wanted that sense,” even portrayed in the clothes people wore.

The designer looked at photos from the period, especially those by photographer Dorothea Lange, instead of at fashion books of the day where everyone appeared unrealistically beautiful.  “The people you see in those moments, like in our story, were woven into the fabric of the city.” She and her team crafted large boards with visuals of each neighborhood in which the story would be placed, which would be reviewed with Van Patten and the production designer.

That approach weighed heavily on Potter, key second assistant director (2nd A.D.) Salvatore Sutera says. “We would bounce ideas off each other, go back and forth, in rounding out the scene. And she loved it. She’s creating a world, with both the principal actors and the background actors. She always made sure the look of the extras was appropriate and realistic.”

In developing her designs, Potter would put a look book together, essentially a mosaic of images of what she and the A.D.s wanted to see in any space, which Van Patten would then approve. And they also created vignettes, small stories, for each background actor. “Say, it was a street scene, where we see Perry walking,” she explains.  “We would have a shopkeeper sweeping, or someone delivering something—and that would inform me on how to come up with the clothing, versus just going down a street with just a whole group of people in casual attire. There are all these little stories behind everything.”

As described above, there were a large variety of appearances background actors would have, based on culture, class, and environment.  Shorts and sandals were decidedly not the common modes of dress for men on the street of Los Angeles in the 30s. “People had limits to their wardrobe,” explains Makeup Dept. Head Christien Tinsley. “They usually had a pair of pants, a couple of nice shirts always pressed, and that’s what you wore.” People going to church, say, at the Radiant Assembly, Potter notes, “For those people that could afford to have clothing, they would have options for their Sunday best,” with the poorer background characters dressed with whatever was the best they had to pay their respects.

And most of those suits and pants were made of wool. “I never realized how much wool there was!” laughs background actor George Zaver. “We had 90 degree days, and there were people wearing coats.”  Notes second A.D. Mollie Stallman, “It never fails – we’d have to shoot summer scenes in mid-winter in L.A., and in July, we’d be doing winters scenes with people in wool suits and overcoats.”

The costumes were, for the most part, literally vintage clothing sourced from vintage websites or stores. A good many were rented from Western Costume in North Hollywood, at which the Costume Dept. set up shop for fittings, once extras had been cast.

Extras Casting Director Rich King would provide lists of names of people who would be working weeks before, to Costumes, Hair and Makeup. Potter would then sit together with her Key Costumers, Angela Nunez and Emilea Rivera, and create multiple options for scenes for each player, prior to fitting. “I would show them the look books and say, ‘This is what I want for this world of background,’” creating designs for each background actor within each beat of the story, the designer explains. “And then, once they had the clothing from the shoppers, the costumers would do the fittings.” The background actors would come in, get fitted, and then are photographed, for approval by Potter and Van Patten.

One other activity took place at fittings at Western Costume: haircuts. “I would always have a barber there, so we could at least get some of the haircuts out of the way,” says Hair Dept. Head Miia Kovero. “That would save time, then, on the day of the shoot.”  Notes James Tappan, who portrayed one of Sister Alice’s guards, “I’ve found, over the years, I get a lot of good haircuts out of this!”

Men’s hair at the time, Kovero says, was “mostly tapered, like clean necks, with maybe 2 or 3 inches on the top,” with hair parted low or in the center. “With a period project, you can tell what year it is just by the haircuts.” The look of the day for women was chin to neck length hair. Many women wore hats, so their styling might be modified. And a good deal of the actresses were given wigs. “We used hundreds of wigs on background actors. We could just prep them beforehand, and just wrap the ladies’ hair underneath and plop the wig on.  Which was often faster than somebody coming in with waist-length hair.” And, though hair straightening had arrived sometime around 1907, a good number of the show’s African-American background actresses were given wigs, especially if their own hairstyle was too modern.

Though somewhat uncomfortable, the effect of wearing true period clothing, even for background actors, is immeasurable. “It affects you instantly,” says Zaver. “You just feel different. All of a sudden, it creates the period. Everything was heavier on you. And, even in that sense, it just transported you. I’d even see one of the photographs they took of me in costume, and I would just think, ‘Wow – this doesn’t feel like I’m here.’” And finding oneself in a mob of like-dressed background actors just made it all the more real, until “Cut!” was called. “Then everybody pulls out their cell phone! I actually tried not to do that, and just thought, ‘I’ll do it during lunch.’ Cause it just kept me in the period.”

Some background also had props. Zaver, for instance, was given a vintage camera on set by the props department as he was portraying a press photographer. “They had a table of them, and you were given one, assigned a letter – ‘George, this is yours,’” which the props department crew would explain and teach him how to operate – even though there was no film.

There were, however, flashbulbs, as was common then, each of which had to be removed and replaced for the next shot a photographer would take. The bulbs were hot, and even though Zaver was given a bag of bulbs to hang from his belt (as was the norm), a props department person would come after each shot and replace it for him. “They also told me, when I took a shot, to tilt the camera up, to avoid flashing the bulb in an actor’s face,” he notes, which would otherwise momentarily blind the performer.

Background actor Adyr Vallaviciencio’s wardrobe included hats. So, like any good actor, he did some homework about how to properly hold one. “I have a friend who’s a wardrobe stylist. And when I mentioned I was doing a period piece, and that I’d be carrying a hat, he told me, ‘Always put your hat close to your heart. And never show them the inside. Never tilt the fedora, unless you’re from a certain part of the city.’ And he told me to hide my cuffs inside my coat because you have to show your watch. The watch shows your status.”

He also studied the way men held themselves when standing or walking, in those days. “Men weren’t slouchers,” he says. “They stood up tall and proud as if they have to stay on their horse and never fall off. No loose hands, like I’m walking in a parade.”

Van Patten noted that, by the time the shoot was over, many of the background cast had truly absorbed the period. “By the end, they actually took on the physicality. They were chain-smoking!” he laughs.

As for makeup, Tinsley took his cues based on the background’s wardrobe, as well as what class of citizen they were portraying, time of their day, etc. A migrant worker, on his way home from work and just passing by, would be given an appropriate level of grime, while a lady out for a day’s grocery shopping would be more relaxed. “Unless it was a woman out shopping with a girlfriend, it was just a natural, non-made-up look, with no lipstick, etc.,” he explains.

People, he notes, tended to be groomed more frequently than we might see today. “And men were always clean-shaven, and probably got a haircut once a month.” Rarely would there be facial hair, except, perhaps, with older gentlemen. We would have about 5 to 10% of the men with facial hair. And the majority of those would be men over 45, perhaps in their 50s or 60s, who likely had a look that was popular when they were 30 – back in 1900.”

Rather than have individual makeup designs for each of 200 or 400 extras, Tinsley developed a palette of about 40 colors to be used on shooting day. “You have two hours, but you have to get 150 people through the works,” he says. “So we built a system that we followed diligently, in order to get to the subscribed look in a timely fashion.” 

For more on our deep-dive into Perry Mason‘s background actors, check out parts III, and IV of this series.

Featured image: Tatiana Maslany is Sister Alice in ‘Perry Mason.’ Photo by: Photograph by Merrick Morton/HBO