These stand-ins have been showing up on your TV for eight or more years and you’ve never noticed.
There are several long-term players on NCIS you've seen but probably never noticed.
Paul Conkling, Sean Murray, Pauley Perrette, and Susan Michaels.
Darren Michaels / CBS
They pop up occasionally in a scene, driving a car, maybe, or standing in the background. If you're an avid NCIS fan, you've watched an episode where they've been onscreen; maybe you've even heard their voice. But a stand-in's job is mostly to stand, to let light bounce off them, and to move as the actor will move, allowing the camera crew and the director to envision how a scene will look.
The work of a stand-in is peculiar.
Michaels, Conkling, and Chris Liner.
Darren Michaels / CBS
They look like their actors in broad strokes — similar height, similar hair color, similar skin tone — but they don't wear the wardrobe, usually dressing in darkish colors so as not to throw off the lighting. They don't really wear makeup, either, unless there are extenuating circumstances, like a sunburn.
Most of them get jobs through a connection to someone on the crew. Chris Liner, who does stand-in work as well as a number of crew jobs, told BuzzFeed News getting a good background gig has a lot to do with "being at the right time, at the right moment, and having some kind of relationship."
"I honestly fell into this business," said Mike Archer, who worked as a stand-in on JAG — of which NCIS is a spin-off — for four years and has been Michael Weatherly's stand-in since Season 1. And among these five long-term stand-ins, that seems to be a universal sentiment.
"I was a game-show model," said Susan Michaels, Pauley Perrette's stand-in since 2003. She told BuzzFeed News she got into background work after her brother-in-law rode in an elevator with someone who worked at Central Casting, the background actor clearinghouse. Her first background job was on Fantasy Island, where she played one of the "lava girls."
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