‘Living Props’: Background Actors and the Production of ‘Occupational Irrelevance’ within Film and Television Work

This article treats background acting as an archetypal case for theorising sociologically the work and workers that exist in the backdrop of a workplace. Turning to the sociology of attention and its conceptualisation of the background of everyday life, it draws on Zerubavel’s ‘social structure of irrelevance’ to understand background acting as an occupation. Based on in-depth interviews with unionised and non-unionised background actors working in the Canadian screen industry, three backgrounding practices are identified that naturalise the workplace background and minimise these workers’ labour: silencing, dividing, and objectifying. ‘Backgrounding’ as a concept highlights how the workplace background is constituted through day-to-day practices where labour is visible but socially constructed as ‘irrelevant’. The final discussion emphasises how backgrounding connects to other concepts for understanding devalued work (e.g., invisible work, or hidden work) within low-status occupations.