The World's Tiniest Share in a BAFTA!

On Sunday night the BAFTA TV awards were announced. For my non-Brit friends BAFTA stands for British Academy Film and Television Awards. They do one ceremony for cinematic releases and one for telly.

So here's the story.
Almost exactly a year ago I joined Gadbury casting as a supporting artiste (ie. an "extra") and they sent me to Trafford in Manchester for a couple of days to play a factory worker in a film called Boy A. It was my first time and very weird but fun, in an odd kind of way. I had to do really exciting things like walk past a window, or pretend to count bottles in a warehouse.

It turned out that Boy A was taken from a fictional book by Jonathan Trigell, based loosely on the famous Jamie Bulger case; the Boy A in question being one of the young murderers trying to build a new life and identity after his release from prison. For those who don't know, Jamie Bulger was a little Liverpool boy of about 2 years old who, in 1993, was taken quietly away from his mother by two older boys (both 10) in a shopping centre, who then tortured and killed him.
(On a personal note, it actually made me feel ill to write that last sentence. Jamie was born in the same year as my eldest son - in other words, I was taking a two-year old boy out shopping with me at the same time.)

The main part was played brilliantly by a young actor called Andrew Garfield, and bravely too. He would have been 10 himself in 1993, so he's exactly the right age, but would you want to be associated with such a dangerous part?

The film
The film of Boy A came out on Channel 4 (where else?) in November last year. It isn't the sort of thing which would attract me and, frankly, I watched it because I was in it! In many ways I'm glad I did but I also wish I hadn't.
Boy A is bleak, deliberately so. The colours are washed out, the atmosphere is all echo and emptiness and the whole thing does Manchester no favours at all. It was what it set out to be: a hard, gritty, uncompromising drama. From my point of view it was two hours of fucking grim. As you can tell, I didn't really enjoy it much.
As for my part - after all the cuts I appear for about two seconds walking away from camera. I only knew it was me because my beloved and my mother recognized the way I walk.

The award
Amazingly Boy A won a BAFTA. Really, that's not so amazing because it was actually won by Andrew Garfield as Best Actor - he earned it too. He's a really nice lad and a damn good actor.
The odd thing is that because I was involved in it - and despite the fact that I barely appear, have no functional role or input to speak of and didn't actually like the end result - I still feel some kind of weird pride in the award.
Somehow I feel like I've got the world's tiniest share in a BAFTA!
Strange or what?

On a much brighter note, Best Film was won by Mark of Cain which starred my agent, and a proper actor, Matthew (Michael) McNulty. Fantastic!

Love,
Seán