The Retired High-School English Teacher With 45 IMDb Credits

In 2016, after nearly 30 years teaching high-school English in Queens, Robert Gold retired and set three goals for his new life. “I wanted to go to the gym more often and work in an animal shelter, but those things never happened,” he says. “And then I wanted to do background work.” As a child, he’d dreamed of being an actor but never pursued it. This time around, he registered with Central Casting and Grant Wilfley Casting, the two main clearinghouses for movie and TV extras in New York, and crossed his fingers.

He picked a good time to launch a second act in show business. The streaming boom was in full swing, fueling a surge in TV shoots across the city and the demand for background extras. Many are local retirees like Gold, happy to collect the modest pay, enjoy the free lunch, and have somewhere to be before noon.

Gold landed his first gig in 2018, at 57, on a movie shooting under the code name Romeo. When he arrived at Steiner Studios the first morning, a production assistant was corralling extras into different groups and handed him a sticker that said JP. “I was like, ‘What is this?’” he recalls. “And the PA said, ‘You’ll find out.’” Gold was seated in the audience of a talk-show set. “There was a really good-looking guy in the row behind me, and suddenly, he disappeared and this scrawny, weird-looking guy took his place,” Gold says. It was Joaquin Phoenix, in character as Arthur Fleck. Romeo, he later learned, was Joker.

Since then, Gold has booked more than 40 background roles, mostly on TV, portraying just about every type of New Yorker you can imagine: a pedestrian on Mr. Robot, a restaurant patron on Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, a hospital visitor on Fleishman Is in Trouble, a strip-club customer on The Deuce, a parent at a children’s show on You, and a synagogue-buffet-line guest on Hunters, among others. People tell him he has a great face — naturally patrician, unmistakably of old New York, suggesting the type of person you’d actually expect to see in a midtown restaurant or seated in the orchestra level of the Met — which made him especially useful on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, where he fit so easily into the mid-century Manhattan setting that he was hired eight times. In one episode, he sits behind Rachel Brosnahan at a Broadway show, chatting with a seatmate and flipping through a Playbill — the most screen time he’s ever had. “That was my luckiest break,” he says.

Gold was especially excited to appear on the Sex and the City spinoff And Just Like That …, having watched the original series. He played a mourner at Mr. Big’s funeral, though at the time, he wasn’t sure whose funeral it was. To prevent leaks, extras weren’t told who they were supposed to be mourning. “When I walked in that day and saw the coffin, I thought, Okay, they killed Samantha,” he says. “I didn’t know it was Big until I saw it on TV.”

He keeps a meticulous log of all these jobs in a Word doc with his call times (often around 6 a.m.), what he wore (usually one of his own suits), what he spent on Lyfts to and from set, and how much he got paid. Gold typically earns less than the union rate, but the money isn’t why he does it. “I get a pension every month, so I’m fine,” he says. “I like doing this, and it keeps me out of the house.” (He lives with two dogs and two cats in a home in Whitestone he originally bought for his parents.)

Earlier this year, Gold hit a dry spell. Weeks went by without a single job or even an availability check. He worried Hollywood was done with him. Then someone in a Facebook group for New York–area extras, Background Behaving Badly, suggested his mandatory online sexual-harassment-prevention certification might have expired. Sure enough, after he renewed it, the calls poured in again.

During the downtime, Gold had kept himself occupied with community theater. The only problem is his busy rehearsal schedule has cut into his availability for film and TV.

And yet, the moment he had an opening, the universe obliged. In mid-November, he sent me an excited email: “I landed a background gig for Monday on Law & Order: SVU as an upper-class restaurant patron.”