{"id":184975,"date":"2025-12-15T15:19:10","date_gmt":"2025-12-15T15:19:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/184975\/"},"modified":"2025-12-15T15:19:10","modified_gmt":"2025-12-15T15:19:10","slug":"the-retired-teacher-with-45-film-and-tv-credits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/184975\/","title":{"rendered":"The Retired Teacher With 45 Film and TV Credits"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\n Robert Gold in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
\n Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo: Prime Video\n <\/p>\n

In 2016, after nearly 30 years teaching high-school English in Queens, Robert Gold retired and set three goals for his new life. \u201cI wanted to go to the gym more often and work in an animal shelter, but those things never happened,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd then I wanted to do background work.\u201d As a child, he\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Reasons to Love New York 2025<\/p>\n


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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. \u201cI was like, \u2018What is this?\u2019\u201d he recalls. \u201cAnd the PA said, \u2018You\u2019ll find out.\u2019\u201d Gold was seated in the audience of a talk-show set. \u201cThere was a really good-looking guy in the row behind me, and suddenly, he disappeared and this scrawny, weird-looking guy took his place,\u201d Gold says. It was Joaquin Phoenix, in character as Arthur Fleck. Romeo, he later learned, was Joker.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n Joker.
\n Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo: Prime Video\n <\/p>\n

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\u2019s show on You, and a synagogue-buffet-line guest on Hunters, among others. People tell him he has a great face \u2014 naturally patrician, unmistakably of old New York, suggesting the type of person you\u2019d actually expect to see in a midtown restaurant or seated in the orchestra level of the Met \u2014 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 \u2014 the most screen time he\u2019s ever had. \u201cThat was my luckiest break,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Gold was especially excited to appear on the Sex and the City spinoff And Just Like That\u2009\u2026, having watched the original series. He played a mourner at Mr. Big\u2019s funeral, though at the time, he wasn\u2019t sure whose funeral it was. To prevent leaks, extras weren\u2019t told who they were supposed to be mourning. \u201cWhen I walked in that day and saw the coffin, I thought, Okay, they killed Samantha,\u201d he says. \u201cI didn\u2019t know it was Big until I saw it on TV.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n Hunters.
\n Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo: Prime Video\n <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n The Flight Attendant
\n Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo: HBO Max\n <\/p>\n

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\u2019t why he does it. \u201cI get a pension every month, so I\u2019m fine,\u201d he says. \u201cI like doing this, and it keeps me out of the house.\u201d (He lives with two dogs and two cats in a home in Whitestone he originally bought for his parents.)<\/p>\n

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\u2013area 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

And yet, the moment he had an opening, the universe obliged. In mid-November, he sent me an excited email: \u201cI landed a background gig for Monday on Law & Order: SVU as an upper-class restaurant patron.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism.
\n If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the December 15, 2025, issue of
\n New York\u00a0Magazine.<\/p>\n

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\n New York Magazine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Robert Gold in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo: Prime Video In 2016, after nearly 30 years…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":184976,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[430,156,409,9728,9273,111,139,69,116825,116826,437,12844],"class_list":["post-184975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-magazine","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-reasons-to-love-new-york","tag-reasons-to-love-new-york-2025","tag-tv","tag-vulture-homepage-lede"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184975\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/184976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}