He also appeared as an extra and in small roles on film and television — the kind of background work that populates American screens with plausible human beings in crowd scenes and coffee shops and the margins of the primary action. This kind of work is unglamorous and generally unrewarding in all the ways that matter to people who aspire to something larger, but it provides proximity to sets and productions and the specific rhythms of film and television work that formal training cannot fully simulate. The actor who has been an extra knows what a set looks like and how it operates. The understudy who has watched a performance every night for months knows something about how a script works in practice that is different from what you learn in a classroom.
The specific period of his New York understudy and extra work overlaps with the period in which his father was being tried and convicted — 1981 to 1982. He had learned about his father’s criminal career from a radio broadcast in 1981, confirmed the connection with his mother, and was navigating that discovery while simultaneously trying to establish himself as an actor. The simultaneity is worth noting: the early years of building a career are the years of maximum uncertainty and maximum vulnerability, when the question of whether the career will work is genuinely unresolved and when external complications have the most capacity to derail. He was twenty years old when he learned what his father was. He was building something, in uncertain conditions, that his father’s story could have complicated significantly.