LONG ROAD TO STARDOM: Uncredited actor acts a real-life corpse on “Monsters Inside Me.” (
)
LONG ROAD TO STARDOM: Uncredited actor acts a real-life corpse on “Monsters Inside Me.” (
)
Sure, finding out whodunnit may be the climax of true-crime shows that air on channels such as Investigation Discovery and Destination America. But the real thrill comes the re-enactment scenes — those sometimes corny moments where little-known actors serve as visual aids in the storytelling.
The production is something of a cottage industry: actors, producers and casting agents who primarily work in the realm of recreating real-life drama.
Mike Hoover, a 65-year-old retiree living in Virginia Beach, has twice appeared on Investigation Discovery’s “Wicked Attraction” and on Destination America’s “A Haunting.”
Hoover says his roles have paid anywhere from $75 to $450 per day.
“Depending on who you are playing, you may be there just for an hour,” he says. “I worked my way up from being a family member to a witness to the victim. My next accomplishment will be the murderer — the murderer and the victim get paid the most.”
The best way to get cast? Look like the real person.
Kevin Kaufman, president of Kaufman Films, which produces shows such as ID’s “I Married a Mobster,” says that’s why production values are typically higher for shows produced here in New York where the talent pool is bigger.
“We bend over backwards to find great actors,” he says. “You’re trying to get lookalikes who, frankly, can act.”
Dominic Stobart, executive producer at Optomen, producer of Animal Planet’s “Monsters Inside Me,” a reality show about people attacked by parasites, says that an unseasoned actor can do just fine.
“The directors put in an enormous amount of effort into constructing the drama using composition, lighting, music,” he says. “So we’re not putting an enormous amount of emphasis on the performance.”
Once cast, actors receive scripts, complete with the narrative “lines” of the real people. Sometimes the actors will have dialogue — last year Hoover played a priest on “A Haunting” and had to pray in Latin for an exorcism. His script gave him one line followed by the instruction “actor will ad lib in rest of scene.” Despite his efforts, most of improvisation will not make it to the screen.
As such, it’s uncommon for this level of performer to make it in the big time.
“For me it’s fun, but for some people, it’s more serious,” says Hoover. “They need the recognition, and they’re serious about being discovered. I know people who believe they’re going to get that break.
“Don’t quit your day job,” he adds.
But Mike Shiflett, a 61-year-old Richmond, VA, resident and professional musician, has bucked the trend. After appearing in reenactment scenes for shows such as “Wicked Attraction,” Shiflett landed himself a gig, with no agent, in Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated “Lincoln” as Senator Robert M.T. Hunter. This November, he’s starring as Will Fritz, chief investigator of the Kennedy assassination, in National Geographic’s “Killing Kennedy,” which stars Rob Lowe.
“I’ve spent all of my life in front of perfect strangers singing, so approaching a director in an audition, the fear factor was gone,” he says. “So I can exhibit what I really want to exhibit. I think that greatly attributed to drawing the attention of bigger fish.”
Whatever you do, don’t call these guys re-enactors.
“They’re actors,” says Hoover. “Re-enactors are those people who do the Civil War battles in costumes.”