It’s usually not hard to be a film extra — all you have to do is be forgettable.
Unfortunately, it actually isn't as easy as you’d think, and plenty of people in the
background have ruined many otherwise perfect scenes.
Here are some hilariously obvious movie extras who just couldn’t get it right.
Teen Wolf
1985's Teen Wolf had a little something extra for audiences.
In the final scene, Michael J. Fox wins the basketball game, kisses the girl, and the
crowd goes …nuts?
Wait, is that a guy standing in the back of the bleachers with his fly down and all his...team
spirit hanging out?
Well, maybe not.
Thanks to a lot of people with too much time on their hands, it turns out that this probably
isn’t the little teen wolf so many thought they saw.
In fact, it might not even be a man at all.
So far, the extra hasn’t come forward to let us all in on the truth of what happened
in those bleachers, but good luck watching the end of Teen Wolf again without noticing it.
Back to The Future III
Remember that heartwarming scene in the conclusion of Back to The Future III?
Good ol' Doc Brown surprises Marty by returning to 1985 to let him know he survived and all was well.
We get to see Clara again and learn of their marriage, but best of all, we're introduced
to Jules and Verne, their two young children.
And then...this:
"It means your future hasn’t been written yet.
No one’s has."
Did you spot it?
Check out Dannel Evans, who plays Verne, motion to someone off camera and start pointing at
his junk.
He probably just had to pee, but still, it's a wonder this shot made it through editing.
Thanks to some visually-challenged editors, Verne's not-so-Great Scott took center stage
at the worst of times.
Ghostbusters
Remember how the trick to being a good extra is not getting noticed?
Apparently, the guy in this shot from 1984's Ghostbusters didn't get the memo:
"I like that shirt friend."
"Ghostbusters!
Alright!"
Clearly the extras were told to act excited, but this guy goes way over the top.
If you look for him throughout the whole movie, you can see him pop up in other places, too.
Like the end credits and this scene where he starts jumping like a lunatic when the
Ghostbusters arrive.
Hard to tell if he’s the world’s worst extra or the Ghostbusters’ biggest fan.
Let's go with both.
The Dark Knight Rises
One of the most difficult aspects of any action film is getting the fighting to look realistic
while making sure that nobody gets hurt.
Sometimes...it doesn’t work out.
Remember Luke’s kick from Return of the Jedi?
Well, Luke could be channeling the Force — but Batman doesn’t have the same excuse.
During the fight scene with Catwoman and Batman in The Dark Knight Rises, you can clearly
see a guy in the background who decides it'd be best to get hit...without actually getting hit.
He gets about four feet away from the Caped Crusader and throws himself backward for no reason.
How does that even happen?
"You saw it, yourself Robin.
The slightest impact was sufficient to instantly reduce them to antimatter."
Ehhh, nice try, Batman.
Next time just screen out the bad extras during auditions.
Enter The Dragon
Enter the Dragon is a groundbreaking martial arts film starring Bruce Lee at the peak of
his career of ass-kicking…
...but apparently even that wasn’t enough to impress one extra.
In a scene where a group of guys are watching Bruce Lee kick the snot out of someone, a
background player who should be stoically standing still starts cracking up.
It’s totally out of place for the scene, but once you know it’s there, all of Bruce
Lee’s bone-cracking kicks disappear and this one giggling extra is all you’ll ever see.
North by Northwest
Toward the end of Hitchcock's classic North by Northwest, an important scene takes place
where Eva Marie Saint points a gun at Cary Grant — and fires.
If you look closely at the boy sitting down directly behind Saint in the shot, he clearly
covers his ears before the gun goes off.
It's another one of those things where, if you catch it, it kind of ruins the scene forever.
But maybe it wasn't a mistake!
Maybe the audience is supposed to know that Saint's character is going to pull a gun and
fire it at Grant!
Because, well, thinking about Hitchcock’s legendary attention to detail, it must have
been, uh, foreshadowing, to hint to the uh, the audience that...
"Oh, what a load of crap!"
Yeah.
Never mind.
That kid sucks.
Jaws
Imagine you're an extra on Jaws, and you're told that you need to look freaked out because
a gigantic, aquatic monster has just eaten a little boy.
That's probably about the only instruction most extras needed, but there was one guy
who clearly thought differently, because instead of screaming for his imaginary children, he's
giggling like a little kid.
Worst of all, he's pretty much center frame and right in the camera for his few seconds
of infamy.
Maybe he thought he was in Sharknado?
"Noooooo!"
Yeah.
That was probably it.
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