Many teenagers share the common goal of ‘making it big’ as an actor or actress. Just like in any other profession, however, everyone has to start out with small roles and climb up the ladder to larger ones.

“[My siblings and I] were extras on ‘Shameless’, a TV show in a Netflix series. We got signed up for it because of my mom’s friend, Dana, the head of the talent agency we are incorporated with,” Casey Lessentine (10) said.

It can be difficult, especially in the film industry, to find an ‘in’ to receive a role, even as an extra. Luckily, the Lessentine siblings had a family friend who was willing to help.

“My mom’s friend decided to create her own agency, and we thought it would be really cool [to join]. She constantly kept looking at extras opportunities, or any actor or actress roles that we met the [criteria for]. ‘Shameless’ had sectioned groups they were looking for so she submitted our pictures and we got [the roles],” Kasseidi Lessentine (10) said.

An extra in either a television show or a movie is supposed to make his or her presence discrete. Even though the extras do not seem to have an important persona in the show itself, they have special instructions to follow.

“We each had different roles that we had to [play]. I was in a group for most of the time. I had to sit on a swingset, walk to a bus stop, and lean against a fence and pretend to talk to people,” Kailey Lessentine (10) said. “We weren’t allowed to talk out loud. We had pretend conversations where we just mouthed everything so that we didn’t [talk over] the main actors,” Kasseidi Lessentine said.  

Sometimes people may feel intimidated working on a large set for the first time. However, that was not the case for the Lessentines.

“It was a lot of fun [working with my siblings]. It was very reassuring and we could be ourselves,” Kailey Lessentine said. “It made it a lot easier to talk to new people because we ended up introducing each other to new people. We made a lot of friends and had a great time,” Casey Lessentine said.