Saturday 22 November 2008

The Window Cleaning Extra



Queenstown, NZ: Mike Legge reckons being a real-life showbiz bit-player can be just as bizarre as anything from hit TV comedy Extras. The Queenstown window cleaner has landed a bucketful of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearances in megabuck movies and TV adverts filmed in the Wakatipu during the last 20 years. But unlike the hapless wannabe character Andy Millman, played by funnyman Ricky Gervais in Extras, down-to-earth Legge treats his acting sideline as a bit of a laugh. “Put it this way, the money from the movies has enabled me to become a window cleaner,” he jokes. The 48-year-old has seen it all while on set. He chuckles when recalling how one of his walk-on pals halted filming of the 1988 Val Kilmer sword-and-sorcery flick Willow.
Scenes were shot near Glenorchy and Legge remembers Hollywood director Ron Howard tearing his hair out when a big fight scene suddenly went pear-shaped. “Just after the action began, Ron suddenly yelled ‘Cut’,” he explains. “He then came over and told us ‘that was good, guys, but I don’t think anyone in the middle of a battle would start waving to the camera’.” “It turned out one of the extras wanted to say ‘Hi mum’. There’s always one.” Legge also shudders at a run-in with a temperamental luvvie while shooting a TV commercial for Harpic bathroom cleaner at a house in Dalefield last year. “It was a 10-second role where I had to pretend to be blinded by the light of a sparkling toilet and then fall to the floor while pulling down a curtain,” he says. “But the director was acting like he was making a major movie and wasn’t happy with my performance.” “We must have done about 300 takes and he kept saying things like ‘what’s your motivation?’ and ‘you’re not giving me enough’. He adds: “The truth is when it appeared on TV, if you didn’t concentrate really hard you wouldn’t even have seen it at all.”
Legge – who’s on the books of Queenstown-based ICAN Models & Talent agency – has had a few disappointments. He was gutted to discover his appearance as a spear-chucking warrior in Willow had hit the cutting-room floor. And in the 2001 climbing flick The Vertical Limit, which starred Chris O’Donnell and was shot on the Remarkables, Legge simply couldn’t recognise himself in any scenes because “all the extras in it had beards and looked exactly the same”.
But the married dad-of-one had better luck with a fleeting performance in the 2007 family film The Water Horse, when he finally got to watch himself in action on the big screen playing a British soldier. “You could say that over the years I’m slowly getting more and more exposure,” he grins.

Originally from Auckland, Legge arrived in Queenstown in 1984 – after failing to get into drama school in Wellington. For many years, he worked as a kitchen hand while writing musicals and plays, as well as performing standup comedy in local pubs. In 2000 he moved to England to be with his now wife Kate, where he had a five-year spell washing dishes at world-famous Windsor Castle, a residence of the Queen, before returning home in 2005. “I used to enjoy standing on the castle battlements in my apron and rubber gloves and imagining I was one of the Royal Family.” He hopes to land a part in The Hobbit, the much-anticipated follow-up to the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. “I missed out on Lord of the Rings when some of it was filmed in Queenstown because I was in the UK at the time,” he says. “I’m determined to make up for it by appearing in The Hobbit ... but I might have to lose a bit of height for that one.”

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