Memo to NYPD: This man is not his character from The Wire.

First it was Breaking Bad's Giancarlo Esposito (or "Gus Fring") who came forward with his story of being stop-and-frisked by the New York Police Department. Over the weekend, while the controversial police tactic was being protested, another actor—this time, from David Simon's inner-city crime epic The Wire—noted his own experience with the policy.

J.D. Williams—who played Preston "Bodie" Broadus for four seasons on The Wire—spoke to Capital New York about his experience with the policy:

"I might get recognized, but [police are] not sure where they know me from. So, a lot of times an officer might think he's arrested me before. But then usually by the time they walk up on me, it's come to them and they're like 'Oh!'"

He also explained he knew many people who had been stop-and-frisked, and was familiar with the practice.

Capital got some video as well:

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Sam Sandek, a potential extra for "The Dark Knight Rises"

It was with mixed feelings that The New York Observer went to a casting call for extras on Christopher Nolan's grand finale of the Batman films, The Dark Knight Rises. On the one hand: it was Saturday afternoon, and Occupy Wall Street protesters were preparing to gather near the Brooklyn Bridge in preparation for their doomed march. On the other...we really wanted to be in a Batman movie. Even if we weren't exactly what the Warner Bros. people had in mind when they put out this casting call last week:

Grant Wilfley Casting, Inc. is casting extras for the new Warner Bros. film Magnus Rex. Producers state: “Take part in the urban action adventure coming to the streets of New York City.” Shoots Oct. 29-Nov. 11, 2011 in NYC.
Seeking—Extras: male and female, 18+, all ethnicities, no experience necessary, to play law enforcement within a city besieged by crime and corruption, specific roles include Guards, Soldiers, and Police Officers, seeking physically fit athletes, people with military and/or law enforcement training/experience, weapons training, and/or martial arts training.
Open call will be held Oct. 1, 10 a.m.-1 p.m. & 2-4 p.m. at Metropolitan Pavilion, 110 W. 19th St. (btwn. Sixth & Seventh aves.), NYC. Bring photo ID (i.e. driver’s license, state ID, student ID, etc.); talent must be able to provide valid unexpired ID to fill out I-9 at time of hiring. Seeking nonunion talent at this call; SAG members who are not already registered with GWCI should also attend the open call. For more info (including time/location details for SAG registration), visit www.gwcnyc.com or call (212) 685-3168. There are no sign-up fees. Professional pay provided. SAG Background Actors Contract.

Full disclosure: We do not look like guards, soldiers, or anyone with military experience. However, logic would follow that the reason Gotham is so messed up and Arkham Asylum patients can walk out into the streets any time they damn choose is because there are a couple weaklings hiding amongst the city's finest. It's with this mental attitude that we showed up, ID in hand, to the Metropolitan Pavillion at 2 p.m.

We didn't know what to expect. A lot of brawny guys who were looking for work now that Law & Order officially doesn't need more patrolmen? A bunch of comic book geeks? Or, option number three:

Total chick-fest! Apparently we weren't the only women who decided that their lack of receding hairline and bury demeanour should exclude them from being thwarted by insane people in crazy outfits. In fact, wouldn't women be more supesceptible to the charms of Thomas Hardy as Bane?

In the spirit of good citizen journalism, we got in line and found 2o-year-old Sam Sandak (that's him with the tattoo), a Tisch student did extra work to raise money for his film. "I'd be in this for free though," Mr. Sandak told us, "Chris Nolan is the fucking man." The young Los Angeles native had experience with Central Casting on West Coast, he informed us, and had already been in the background of several features, including the HBO film, Cinema Verite.

"Usually if you're an extra, they keep you sort of netted off from the talent," Mr. Sandek told us, "It's a lot of waiting around." That was fine. People who have been occupying Wall Street these past to weeks know that sometimes you wait around in a netted area for hours and don't get paid at all. (Unless pepper-spray can now be traded for goods and services in this country. Which it can't. Yet.)

The line moved relatively quickly and were were soon seated in the back of a room full of folding chairs. Each chair had a form to fill out containing our necessary stats. It was surprisingly hard, as we had no idea how our bust size differed from our bra size. We made a bunch of the numbers up, actually. Please don't think that we actually know what our waist to hip ratio is.

The people in charge of the casting cattle call got things rolling right off the bat. "Who here has any military training?" they asked. A few big men raised their hands.

"Police training?"

A lot more hands were raised. (Wow, seriously? What were they doing auditioning for movies?)

"Any firemen in this crowd?"

No hands were raised. Those gifted with army or police experience got to go over to a special table and have their photo taken. The rest of us had to wait. We turned to the couple next to us: a striking boyfriend/girlfriend couple that looked super buff. Robert Buesing was a 6'4 Wall Street finance guy who rowed in his spare time. His girlfriend, Jessica Kopcho, was 5'11, also a rower, and played soccer for fun when she wasn't working for her post-back laureate in medicine. It was a first time casting experience for both of them. We doubted that they had ever read Frank Miller's Dark Knight graphic novels, although Mr. Buesing did laugh at our joke about the dour faces the former military/policemen were making in their photos: "Why so serious?" This is them, by the way. Look for these two in the big climax of the new Batman film where a bunch of stuff blows up and everyone goes running.

Other things heard at the casting call:

Girl with a shaved mohawk one row behind us, with evident pride): "My friend was an extra in Waterboy."

Blonde chubby woman woman sitting near the front: "After this I'm going to the Strand and applying for a job."

Buff Latino man several chairs down: I heard Cillian Murphy is going to be in this. Do you think I can tweet about that, or is that against the rules?

Finally, it was our row's turn to get our photo taken. We tried to look tough. Snap, snap: we had two seconds in front of the camera before the next person was ushered in. Now we know what the term cattle call referred to; we felt like a piece of meat. That is until we heard the casting lady ask the photographer as we were leaving to read out our number for her to circle on her sheet. Her special sheet of people that were definitely going to be cast in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises to then be picked out of the swarms of extras for a speaking part, before rising to stardom following a brief affair with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. You know, that sheet.

As we were leaving we expected to see another line trailing out the door. But it had started to rain, and apparently that's enough to persuade even the most hardcore superhero fans to stay indoors and rewatch the Iron Man movies instead of auditioning for the coolest thing ever.

However, we did talk to some New York Film Academy students on our way out. They weren't here to audition, but wanted to see if they could find someone to fill in for a missing actress in their movie. We considered for a moment...but it was raining. Even Bruce Wayne takes a day off for inclement weather, right?

Amber Heard. (Photo: Michael Buckner / Getty Images)

Amber Heard
The Rum Diary and The Playboy Club
It can’t be easy to be Amber Heard. The 25-year-old actress is in possession of the sort of smashing beauty that gets one featured on Maxim lists and offered parts in the likes of The Playboy Club, and charisma that goes unnoticed. The upcoming NBC drama, in which Ms. Heard is to play the most valuable Bunny at one of Hugh Hefner’s sex-and-Scotch nightspots, will create the sort of sensation Ms. Heard (previously best known for a string of near-mute girlfriend parts in films like Pineapple Express and The Stepfather) has thus far not experienced, but the part still demands more from her appearance than her thespianic skills. Thankfully, Ms. Heard’s talents are to be tested in the Hunter S. Thompson adaptation The Rum Diary, in which she plays the object of obsession for Johnny Depp’s alcoholic journalist character. Sure, it’s another girlfriend part, of sorts, but based on the epically terrible shoot and the evident artistic ambitions of Mr. Depp and director Bruce Robinson, Ms. Heard might soon be able to add line items to her resume that don’t include Maxim or Playboy.

Jean Dujardin
The Artist
Cannes’s Best Actor winner can finally be seen stateside once The Artist makes its big, Weinstein-backed bow in October; the silent film depicts the change in fortunes of a silent-cinema star upon the advent of the “talkies.” Per Sunset Boulevard, it’s the pictures that got small, as everything about Jean Dujardin’s performance is said to be big—with an inborn star quality not requiring speech to communicate both swashbuckling in films-within-the-film and deep pathos once the last swash has been buckled. If enough of us are able to appreciate the virtue of a wordless performance, Mr. Dujardin could well be the next European unknown to land at the Oscar ceremony—an unusual next step for a French comedian.

Elizabeth Olsen and Sean Durkin
Martha Marcy May Marlene
The lead actress in Martha Marcy May Marlene and her director both got the kind of reviews, when their film played Sundance, about which an emerging star dreams. Ms. Olsen plays a young woman who leaves behind her cult compound to join her family, despite carrying with her untold emotional scars. The performance has a high degree of difficulty, which might be perceived to be compounded by Ms. Olsen’s youth and relative inexperience. (Her biggest previous screen credits were two cameos in mid-1990s films starring her sisters, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, who went on to name their fashion line Elizabeth and James after her.) But it was her low profile that attracted Mr. Durkin, who told The Observer: “I auditioned every unknown actress that I could in New York and L.A.—and she came in and there was just something happening that wasn’t happening with anyone else. There was a quiet intensity, an intelligence, and some real turmoil quietly going on in her head.”

Ms. Olsen has already begun making fashion-icon-ish appearances on red carpets to promote the film, but on set she was just one of the guys. This was perhaps aided by Mr. Durkin’s laissez-faire policy: “It’s always good vibes, and good people... and everyone becomes friends, and we hang out at the bars.”

As for the more formal gathering ahead, as Oscar season looms and its star prepares to go the way of ingenues past: “We’ve got a long fall of events and things. We’re ready for it!”

Ezra Miller
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Tilda Swinton soaked up the oxygen at Cannes, and director Lynne Ramsay is both beloved and given to long absences (her last film, Morvern Callar, came out in 2002). But the star of We Need to Talk About Kevin may well be Kevin, as played by Ezra Miller. Kevin is a sociopathic bad-seed whose parents struggle to understand his brutal actions. Early reviews from Cannes indicated that Mr. Miller, all of 18, struck the note of inscrutable evil that the script required: the purpose of the film is to indicate that, while his parents need to talk, they know not what to say about their violent son.  Mr. Miller, who previously portrayed a disaffected teen nasty beyond his years in the sleeper Afterschool, has a future ahead of him playing young men in the thrall of vaguely sinister, obscurely-motivated desires—he’s next portraying a corrupted high school senior in the sure-to-be-teen-smash The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

ddadarrio@observer

The Wall Street Journal has a trend story about the wave of unsuccessful actors who work for Bed Bug Busters NY — vermin cleansers with an eye for the dramatic. Showbiz dropout Janet Friedman founded the company after "42nd Street," where she was a stage magager, closed, leaving her without a job. Now, she hires out-of-work actors because they "have great personalities and follow directions well."

Getting through the day seems like a piece of cake! All you have to do, according to failed actress Meagan Gilliand, is "pretend to be OK, like you're still having a good time with friends and stuff, while you're choking on a lot of dust." 

Hopefully your acting skills weren't too insufficient — that sounds like a lot of pretending!

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234 

More interesting are the ones who succeed, and why. As a supplement to our feature on Justin Timberlake — the "it" singer-actor of the moment — The Observer takes a look at the best-known transformations from radio to the silver screen, and ranks them each out of ten. 

SLIDESHOW: Scoring Musician-to-Actor Transitions

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234