Yes, it’s true. I’m a movie star now. Don’t get excited, I won’t forget you when I’m living the life of a superstar…
I spent a day or two over the last week with the cast and crew of a movie named ‘Switchback’ which is aiming to get a theatrical release this year.
I’m in two scenes – a funeral and a festival. Clearly, I figure, my character is pivotal in adjoining these two moments of mourning and celebration! I play the part of ‘Paddy McGerald Fitzduffy O’Reilly’, I decided in developing my character that ‘Paddy’ had been abandoned by his parents at an early age and left on the steps of the Switchback mine (“Switchback” is the name of the movie!) where he was picked up by a pack of wolves living in the Adirondack forests. At the age of 13 Paddy was rescued by some hunters who had inadvertently killed his foster-parent wolf family. On returning to human life Paddy was unable to maintain proper social relationships and spent much of his teenage years drifting though the village as a bit of an outsider, not making any friends and, in fact, only communicating through an elaborate series of grunts and growls and would, on occasion, be found rolling around the center of town hunting the neighborhood cats.
Eventually he was picked up by some of the people running the mine where he was left as a baby to work in the mine where he was put to work diving blindly into the mines to test for gases before people who were important entered, since the area was too poor to afford ‘test canaries’.
For this reason, the character of Paddy is portrayed accurately by me by standing around awkwardly, never being next to the same person twice and generally seeming very unexcited about much of anything that’s going on, since he doesn’t understand the human concept of’ ‘excitement’.
Of course, on film my character’s obviously diverse and intriguing background is set aside and not spoken about because it would be clearly too distracting from the main plot of the film which has nothing to do with wolves or abandoned babies, as far as I know. So all you’ll see of me is me hanging out in the background, next to different people every time.
Some people would tell you that the reason I’m standing next to different people any time you might see me is because, unlike most other extras in the film, I arrived on my own and the people I spoke to during the funeral scene weren’t there for the festival. These same cynical folks might tell you “Maybe you’re just awkward and you’re standing around looking like a tool has nothing to do with a back-story and much more to do with you actually being a slight social reject”, but these people are wrong! The whole movie is just a little insight into the perplexing character that is Paddy McGerald Fitzduffy O’Reilly.
Everything else that happens in the movie is just a little entertainment in between my epic scenes.
And the reason I’m not listed by that character name, or actually at all, in the credits for the movie?
Well, that’s because this whole blog entry was a lie.
Spike Vicious 