OpinionExtras have become weirdly compelling since an opera singer tackled her reflux ...May 27, 2026 — 1:16pmYou’re not supposed to focus on the extras when you’re watching TV – they’re sometimes even referred to as “human set dressing”. But I became fixated on background actors while watching the Apple TV series Your Friends & Neighbours and now I can’t stop looking at them.The show is about a finance guy (Jon Hamm) who lives in an exclusive suburban enclave in New York. When he loses his job, he starts breaking into his friends’ and neighbours’ houses, stealing their luxury goods. In the early episodes, I kept spotting one background actor who looked eerily familiar. I couldn’t figure out where I’d seen her, or her likeness, before. Reality TV? The local pool? The Aldi checkout?Then it clicked. This background actor looked just like an American opera singer whose reflux recovery journey I’d been mysteriously drawn into on Instagram about two years ago. (I don’t follow any other opera singers and still have no idea why the algorithm delivered me this stomach-juicy content.) Will AI’s Tilly Norwood push our biggest stars into the background?Robin CowcherThe first couple of episodes of Your Friends & Neighbours were slow going and I’m getting cynical about all these prestige dramas satirising the grotesquely rich. But it was easier to push through my misgivings when the show became not just a satire of the mega-rich starring Hamm, but also a Where’s Wally? of opera-world reflux survivors.Soon enough, I was hooked. There are a lot of party and country club scenes, and these kept me busy. They are filled with expensively dressed extras mingling in the background, wielding tennis racquets and champagne flutes. Their presence is as vital to creating the world of outlandish wealth as the show’s fancy cars and lavish locations. And in a show about social transgression, their peering, watchful eyes raise the show’s stakes. (The extras are especially important as voyeurs in a crowded cafe scene where one rich lady punches another.)After a while, the reflux lady emerged as a character with a speaking part, and I realised she wasn’t the opera singer at all. But by this time I’d spent way too much time appreciating the costuming, casting, direction and acting that made those scenes with background actors so effective. I kept thinking back to Ricky Gervais’ comedy series Extras, about the indignities of the work and the challenges background actors pose to filmmakers. (Gervais’ Andy is always complaining about his uncomfortable costumes and harassing powerful people on set to get him speaking parts.)The indignities for background actors have compounded since Extras. In recent years, they have sometimes even provided the biometric data that’s used to train the cheaper, easier-to-wrangle AI avatars threatening to replace them. Background actors on film sets across the world have reported being pressured into submitting to digital body scans, often without a clear agreement on how their data might be used.Post-production tools such as “crowd-tiling” have been used for a long time to create stadium or army scenes, but we’re now in the age of individuated AI-generated actors. The world’s first fully AI actor, Tilly Norwood, burst onto the scene last year, too, sparking controversy. (Naturally, she’s a generic “girl-next-door” type and if she didn’t pose a global existential threat she’d be boring as hell.) Celebrity actors like Emily Blunt and Whoopi Goldberg spoke out against Tilly, but it’s background actors who are most exposed to the threat she poses.That’s a shame, I think, because real people bring unpredictability and human idiosyncrasy to scenes, even in the background.One of my favourite examples occurs in 2014’s Birdman, when a frantic Michael Keaton walks through Times Square in his underwear. It was made using a combination of paid extras and unsuspecting members of the public and it’s the frenzied, spontaneous crowd reactions that give the scene its energy.The extras on Jaws were a famously anarchic bunch, sometimes grinning when they were supposed to be screaming. But their exuberance adds to the gleefully gory spirit of the film, its comedy and its hysteria.It’s sad to imagine those wacky, wayward humans replaced by mass-generated Sloppy Norwood types – bloodless, soulless, pathetically free of surging stomach-acids.What background AI actors will not bring to scenes, even as the technology improves, is spontaneity. They’ll just populate the background, faithfully executing their outputs. That might be a tempting prospect for some studios and filmmakers, but it feels like an erosion of magic. Could a background AI actor ever inspire a viewer on a weird gastro-oesophageal side-quest? It’s hard to say. Certainly, the encroachment of AI on human creative chaos inspires a rising, queasy sense of dread.Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.Default avatarSophie Quick is the author of The Confidence WomanFrom our partners