Working Background as a Son(s) of Anarchy

In 2022, a guy I know who worked on Mayans MC called me and asked if I could work background on the show. I may have passed on it—background work is as much fun as being stuck in an elevator—but then he said they needed white boys for the Sons of Anarchy. Oh yes, I was in.

“One favor I have to ask,” he said. “Could you keep an eye on my friend Seth? He’s been struggling with some things.”

I’m not good a selfies. Too Gen X for that. Best one I captured. They made a big stink about not taking pictures. Mostly they didn’t want us posting on social media before the episode aired. The show’s been cancelled for a few years now, so I guess it’s cool? Who knows.

From the life my friend and I have lived and left behind, I surmised this meant Seth was having drug trouble. Sure.

I was fully prepared to babysit this Seth guy. I would be getting paid union scale background for the day, so it was part of the paid gig as I saw it. And worth it to wear the “cuts.”

Background Work

Background work used to be called “extra work.” I don’t know when this changed but throughout my time on set, if I said “extra” the regular employees quickly said “background” as a correction. Probably one of the many union rules—try to help someone carry something heavy on a set and both the Teamsters and the production crew will freak out and order you to stop. Getting paid union scale was only $187 a day, but we also got the cast/crew food, and not the Fyre Festival-style bologna sandwiches the nonunions crew eat. The only “hard” part of the job is the boredom—you are literally a prop sitting around, waiting to be used, maybe. Bring a book. A thick one.

You can talk to the other background actors, but look out. It’s full of people who have just moved to LA and are trying to make it, and tell Lana Turner-esque urban legends about their friend’s cousin who got a speaking role from being an extra, and if they can just get their SAG card, they’ll be set, and did you know you had to get an acting gig to get a SAG card but you can’t get a SAG card without having an acting gig? And express true shock at the common problem that exists in every creative art. Or they want to talk about the acid trip they had at Burning Man that “told them” to pursue acting, or about a high school production of Our Town where they just knew this was for them. Under no circumstances should you ever tell them that you personally know anyone who may be working on the show in any capacity.

Here are the big rules:

• Don’t look into the camera.

• Don’t talk to the actors.

• Don’t talk to the crew.

• Don’t make any noise during shooting.

• Don’t say anything at all when the camera’s rolling, even if one of the actors ad libs to you.

The Other Sons

After I went to wardrobe and got the famous vest, known as “cuts” in biker culture, I was given the spiel about how much shit I would get into if it didn’t come back. One of the reasons they wanted friends-of-friends working as the bikers was that everyone’s first reactions to putting on the colors are “I want to keep this” and/or “I wonder how much I could get for it.”

They sent me to the corral with the other Sons, who turned out to be actual bikers from a MC that will not be named, but I will just call Actual Bikers. Those guys are always touchy about saying anything about them if you’re not one of them, so I’m going to leave it there.

“What do you ride?” one asked when I walked up. The rest got quiet, trying to figure out who I was.

“A Smart Car,” I said. This is true.

“No, really,” he said. “We don’t care. We just want to know. You can get paid more if you have a Harley if they want it for the scene.”

“I really have a Smart Car,” I assured him. “I’m not fucking with you. I have a horrible sense of balance. A bicycle’s not a good idea. A motorcycle is a worse idea.”

We went around exchanging names. Usually “Bucky” is the weird name. Not this time. Of course, you’re not getting those, but at least one of them had an adjective for a name. If you want to profile children to see who will become a biker, find the ones who see all the kids’ movies and aspire to be one of the Seven Dwarfs, which is the biker culture starter kit—get a clubhouse off the beaten path, fill it with your bros, and get one hot chick who will take care of all of you. But there was no Seth among them.

I met Seth coming back from smoking a cigarette alone. It had to be him, from that “takes one to know one” POV. I walked up and introduced myself. He was on something, but what I guessed at the time is a specific prescription med that is given to someone to keep them off harder stuff, but also is a horrible ride itself—in no way an easy fix, a pharmaceutical that I consider to do more harm than good in many situations¹. I told him we had our mutual friend. He had that “caught dirty” look on his face. I don’t know what he was on, but he didn’t act sober. We exchanged some recovery code words back and forth, but frankly, I had no idea if he was telling the truth about anything. I gave him my number and told him we could talk or hit a meeting or whatever. He seemed at once grateful and wanting to get the fuck away. I let him go, and walked back to the corral of Actual Bikers, and he to a phone call.

Oh fuck, I thought. That was Seth Binzer, aka Shifty Shellshock from Crazy Town. It usually takes a little while for the recognition to set in.

The Actual Bikers were hilarious. I was the new guy who hadn’t heard any of their stories. They were good at one thing: being bikers. They had fucked up construction jobs, ruined marriages, gotten arrested for dumb shit, been way too high, and of course, wrecked bikes and survived. This is how you tell a real tough guy: he’s going to tell you about how much his ass has been kicked by life. The dudes who brag about fighting and fucking hotties—they’re all full of shit. I was thoroughly entertained.

Getting The Shots

When it came time to film scenes, the PAs would come get us. And say things like “I need four of you.” To which the biggest Actual Biker would say “Which ones?” with a bit of a menacing glare. The PA never wanted to choose. They were all scared of these guys, which the Actual Bikers used to their benefit and mostly amusement.

So we’d all go. Every time. Except Seth, who I only saw sit in one shot the whole time. He didn’t make it the whole day. Didn’t hear what happened, but at the end of the day, when we were all returning our cuts to wardrobe, he wasn’t there. I think when we were all walking to a sound stage, he just slipped out a side door.

The best you’ll see me on the show. I’m in the background in a lot of scenes, but so blurred out with depth of field that you can’t see me.

When they put us in the shots, it was well far behind the actors, the reason being is that actors are small. You don’t notice so much on TV. But at six-two, I towered over one of the actors. We need to look big in the background, but they don’t want us to make the actors look like weenies.

One of the Actual Bikers either had bad gas or could fart on command. His favorite trick was to ask a PA “Do you smell popcorn?” to which they would respond with a deep sniff which filled their nose with a curdled egg stench. Over the four days we shot, his goal was to do this to as many crew members as possible. I am a man in my 50s, and this shit got funnier every time.

Nutty Buddys: if I had a club, this would be the name.

One of the days, while filming at a ranch, we had a shade tent, but it was still hot out. The Actual Bikers were a little surly. We were all dressed in jeans, boots, and long-sleeve shirts—not horrible, but not the best.

We always got meals, and good ones, but there’s also a place called Crafty on every set where they have water and snacks. I hit up Crafty and found out they had a freezer full of Nutty Buddys that the actors weren’t going near, who were all on strict diets. Fuck strict diets! I got my Nutty Buddy and went back to the tent.

“Holy shit!” Farty McGee exclaimed. “They have Nutty Buddys at Crafty?”

“They sure do!” I said.

I thought they were going to patch me in for that one.

Soon, we were a tent full of bikers eating Nutty Buddys, when a PA entered the tent.

“We need the Sons at the burn site,” he said, referring to an area in which a stuntman would be set on fire.

“We’re finishing our Nutty Buddys,” Farty said, with a genteel “how dare you sir” tone in his voice.

“Oh! Sorry!” the PA said, and scampered off.

The stuntman being set on fire and running around was the most intense thing I’ve seen on a movie set. There’s a “suit” but it only protects so much. Dude was voluntarily being set on fire and running through his blocked-out path. I was close enough to the point that I thought it was too hot when he ran by me. I can’t imagine actually being on fire for a living.

Aftermath

On the last day, the Actual Bikers caught me in the parking lot with the Smart Car. They still held out that I was fucking with them. They asked me to get in and out of it, just so they could see it. It was the biggest laugh I got the whole time.

Seth Binzer died in 2024 with a number of drugs in his system. It sucks to hear, just on this level that I know this problem first hand, and that it can be beaten if you devote yourself to it. As we say, it’s a simple program, but it’s not easy.

But strangely, one of my sisters who is congenial but rarely opened up to me started talking to me once my episode aired. The following season, after the show wrapped up, she finally told me about how she left her club three years prior—I have two sisters, and one is a squeaky-clean music teacher in Arkansas, and the other has had her face blurred out on the History Channel. She was in one of the real outlaw biker clubs, basically the Gemma character on Sons of Anarchy. Her old man’s guts blew out from years of drinking, and he died quite suddenly of an internal hemorrhage. After that, she was too heartbroken to stay in the club.

For me, the experience was equivalent to my friends getting a role on a Star Trek series—a chance to be a part of a fictional universe. There’s some kind of bullshit mentality around Los Angeles that movies, acting, and the like are real. A disconnect that everything that is overtly pretense is genuine. I’m technically a real Sons of Anarchy member—a club that is entirely not real—a real part of a fake. The town is full of fake bikers, fake gangstas, fake “pimps,” fake anatomies, fake politics. Everyone says they’re an actor, comic, director, writer, when they’re primarily something else. “Fake it til you make it” becomes “Fake it.”

For my sister, it was a soap opera she could relate to. I had done it for the selfie, for a moment in a costume. But I can’t describe the gratitude I had for what is probably my last close moment with her. She’s a very private person, who now lives on a remote mountain in West Virginia. I’m in touch with my family—my dad still texts me about Cardinals games—but we’re not close. For the most part, I’m fine with that. I can’t get deep into the family woods here in the last paragraph. But it was nice, for a moment, to have a “normal” brother-sister talk. He was the love of her life, and yes, he had an adjective for a name.

1. My experience with said drug is anecdotal. I don’t want to write it publicly. But I know a lot of career junkies who switched to it to get off heroin and they either went back because it was too harsh and a few who killed themselves while on it. I don’t think anyone should be on it except on a very supervised, very short-term, inpatient basis.