10 Famous Actors You Didn't Notice As Extras In Movies & TV Shows

Show business is notoriously tough — and before actors make it big, they end up taking small parts to get by. It's inevitable, and if an aspiring actor doesn't book something super lucrative like, say, a national commercial (which can provide solid payouts every time they air), they probably turn to background work to make ends meet and get some exposure. All of this is to say that, if you're enjoying a slightly older movie or TV show, you might see a familiar face in a background scene from time to time. So, which of your favorite famous actors worked as an extra before they got their big break?

From an actor who eventually became a duchess to a handful of Oscar winners to the star of a breakout Netflix hit, here are just a few performers you can spot in the background or in small roles from their early days in the industry. Go back and check out these projects and see if you can spot them just for fun; we've included some wonderfully low-res photos to help you track these famous faces down.

Long before her wedding to Prince Harry aired on television screens across the world, Meghan Markle appeared in the pilot of the 2008 reboot of "90210" — as a student caught in a very compromising position. During the first episode, new West Beverly Hills High student Annie Wilson (Shenae Grimes) sees Ethan Ward (future "Schitt's Creek" star Dustin Milligan), whom she had met years beforehand ... only to realize that he's hooking up with a girl who's definitely not his girlfriend. Annie promises Ethan that she won't tell his girlfriend, the school's queen bee Naomi Clark (AnnaLynne McCord), but obviously, the truth comes out eventually.

Markle went on to appear in episodes of shows like "Fringe" and "Without a Trace" in the years that followed, and in 2011, she booked her biggest role yet on the legal drama "Suits" as paralegal and future lawyer Rachel Zane. That is, as we all know, not the end of Markle's story though. In 2018, she married Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, and became the Duchess of Sussex, joining the British royal family as the first American to truly become a part of the storied monarchy (Wallis Simpson doesn't count). Anyone watching the first episode of "90210" should look closely for a surprise — namely, one of the most famous women in the world appearing as a popular guy's secret hookup.

At this point in his career, Michael B. Jordan works as an actor, director, and producer and owns a stake in a British football club — but back in the day, he was just a little kid who scored a huge role on one of HBO's very best original shows. In the first season of "The Sopranos," Jordan appears in the seventh episode — titled "Down Neck" — in a flashback sequence where mob boss Tony Soprano (the late, great James Gandolfini) remembers his childhood in Newark in the 1960s. In the flashback, a young Tony is bullied by a few kids, one of whom is Jordan in his very first on-screen credit.

Jordan is a Hollywood staple at this point; after his breakthrough role came in 2013 thanks to Ryan Coogler's drama "Fruitvale Station," Jordan played Johnny Storm in Josh Trank's infamously bad "Fantastic Four" movie in 2015. Luckily, that same year, Jordan starred in the legacy "Rocky" sequel "Creed," which ensured that the stink of "Fantastic Four" didn't stick; later on, Jordan joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2018's "Black Panther" as the captivating villain Erik Killmonger and kept making "Creed" movies (he even directed the third one in 2023). Clearly, he's come a long way from terrorizing a young Tony Soprano.

If you're a British actor, odds are good that you appeared in a "Harry Potter" movie at some point, especially if you're an actor of a certain age; this is certainly true for Regé-Jean Page, who appeared (very, very briefly) in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 1" back in 2010. During a scene towards the beginning of the film, the main characters all gather at the Weasley family home, the Burrow, to celebrate the wedding of their eldest son Bill (Domhnall Gleeson), only to face an attack from Death Eaters working for the Dark Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes). As the guests realize they're under fire from enemy forces, they watch in horror and then scatter, at which point you can see Page standing behind Hermione Granger and Bill's mother Molly (Emma Watson and Julie Walters, respectively).

Page gained some notoriety in 2016 when he appeared in a few episodes of a new take on "Roots" and in 2018 when he appeared in the steampunk dystopia "Mortal Engines" — written by the team behind the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy — but his real break didn't come until 2020 thanks to Shonda Rhimes' steamy Netflix original "Bridgerton." Page left the show after one season of playing Duke Simon Basset, the inaugural season's main love interest, and in 2022, he appeared in "The Gray Man" on the streamer before joining the cast of "Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Amongst Thieves" in 2023. His "Harry Potter" role is so small that it's actually uncredited, but there's zero doubt that it's him behind Hermione.

To be honest, this might be the silliest example on the list, in that it's almost impossible to see Renée Zellweger in the background of Richard Linklater's 1993 comedy "Dazed and Confused." While Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck, Parker Posey, Adam Goldberg, and Milla Jovovich get to play much more significant roles, Zellweger is just ... sort of there, and according to Linklater, she's in the coming-of-age movie more than you think. During a 2016 Sundance panel (via Mashable), Linklater said of Zellweger, "Renée doesn't have a single line, but she's everywhere," eventually saying that she was considered to play high school senior Darla before he went with Posey instead. ("Parker was just crazier," Linklater explained.)

"Dazed and Confused" was one of Zellweger's first-ever screen credits — she appeared in the zombie comedy "My Boyfriend's Back" that same year — and after showing up in "Empire Records" in 1995, she earned international fame and acclaim in 1996 for her role as Dorothy in "Jerry Maguire." "Me, Myself & Irene," "Nurse Betty," and the British comedy "Bridget Jones's Diary" followed, as did Rob Marshall's 2002 movie musical "Chicago" (both of those netted Zellweger Oscar nominations to boot). Zellweger has two Oscars now — one for her supporting turn in 2004's "Cold Mountain" and one for her leading role in the 2020 biopic "Judy," where she plays Hollywood legend Judy Garland — so hopefully, she's not fretting about the fact that she's barely in "Dazed and Confused."

Back in 1999, just a few years before she led David Fincher's taut thriller "Panic Room" with Jodie Foster, a young Kristen Stewart appeared in one feature film and one TV movie in uncredited roles. The feature, "The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas," casts Stewart as a girl playing ring toss — you only see the back of her head — and the TV movie, "The Thirteenth Year," hit the Disney Channel and introduced Stewart as a kid waiting in line for a water fountain. Thrilling stuff!

"Panic Room," as it turns out, was just the start of Stewart's long and illustrious career. While she was still pretty young, she worked on projects like "Cold Creek Manor," another TV movie — an adaptation of the young adult novel "Speak" — in 2004, and in bigger films like "In the Land of Women" and "Into the Wild." Then "Twilight" came in 2008, which catapulted the actor to superstardom alongside her co-star Robert Pattinson (the two dated on and off throughout the film franchise) and convinced everybody that she wasn't very good at acting. Stewart proved them all wrong in the end; her "Twilight" character Bella Swan was simply uninteresting and underwritten, and once the "Twilight" saga concluded, Stewart started working with directors like Olivier Assayas and earning major international awards. (She's the only American woman to win a César, the French equivalent of an Oscar, which she earned for Assayas' film "Clouds of Sils Maria.") In 2020, Stewart led the romantic comedy "Happiest Season," earned an Oscar nomination for the Princess Diana biopic "Spencer" the following year, and more recently, she's appeared in "Crimes of the Future" and "Love Lies Bleeding." If a director wanted to be really funny, they could put her in the background of some movie or TV show and make her wait in line for another water fountain.

Willem Dafoe has been in, conservatively, one billion movies — but you might not know that he's a background actor in the 1980 Western "Heaven's Gate." It's actually incredible that he ended up in the movie at all, if Dafoe is to be believed; in 2019, he did a career timeline video for Vanity Fair and made a confession about "Heaven's Gate," which stars Kris Kristofferson and Christopher Walken and was helmed by "The Deer Hunter" director Michael Cimino. Apparently, Cimino wanted to cast — this is Dafoe's wording, not mine — "ethnic faces" and asked actors to prepare a monologue in English and another language, so Dafoe ... lied. "I had a friend of mine phonetically write out that speech in Dutch," the actor reveals in the video. "They just assumed I was fluent in Dutch!" (The movie was such a massive misfire that it ended up bankrupting the studio United Artists, so it feels like Dafoe is the real winner here.)

Dafoe is, like I said, in everything. He's in Sam Raimi's "Spider-Man" movies, he works with auteurs like Lars von Trier, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Robert Eggers — producing delightfully weird and unsettling stuff like "The Lighthouse," "Poor Things," "Kinds of Kindness," and "Melancholia" — and he's contributed his voice to the English-language dubs for several Hayao Miyazaki animated films. It would take me less time to say the movies Dafoe isn't in; clearly, his experience on the absolute dud "Heaven's Gate" didn't adversely affect his career one bit, and we're all grateful about that.

Thanks to the fact that Eddie Murphy plays both the lead character Prince Akeem Joffer (the Crown Prince of the fictional African nation Zamunda) and barbershop owner Clarence in his 1988 comedy "Coming to America," there are a fair amount of scenes set in Clarence's shop ... and one of them features a young Cuba Gooding Jr. getting a haircut from Murphy's proprietor. How Gooding Jr. didn't laugh on-screen, we'll never know — but the fact that he kept a straight face while Murphy performed definitely was a good indicator that the kid was seriously talented.

Three years after "Coming to America," Gooding Jr. appeared in John Singleton's classic film "Boyz n the Hood," following that with "A Few Good Men" in 1992, "Jerry Maguire" in 1996 — which earned him an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor — and "As Good as It Gets" in 1997. Gooding Jr. has continued working steadily since that genuinely incredible run in the 1990s — in 2014, he joined the sprawling cast of Ava DuVernay's film "Selma" — but fans of "Coming to America" know he really got his start in that movie.

There's really not a whole lot to say about Leonardo DiCaprio's appearance on "Roseanne." The young actor got his start on the small screen — he actually showed up in 12 episodes of the 1990s sitcom "Parenthood" and on an episode of "The Mickey Mouse Club" before he appeared on "Roseanne" — and in the 1991 episode "Home-Ec," he plays a classmate of Sara Gilbert's Darlene. At the time, it feels unlikely that anyone on the set of "Roseanne" knew that they were in the presence of one of the most ambitious and powerful actors of their generation; he probably wasn't eating any raw bison while he filmed that scene, for example. (Well, hopefully he wasn't.)

The raw bison thing ended up happening while DiCaprio filmed Alejandro Iñárritu's 2015 frontier drama "The Revenant," which won DiCaprio the Oscar he'd been striving to snag for years at that point, but he did plenty before (and after) that that's worth mentioning. Before he finally won his Academy Award, DiCaprio was nominated for some of his biggest and best projects — "What's Eating Gilbert Grape," "The Aviator," "Blood Diamond," and "The Wolf of Wall Street," and he scored a nod after his win in 2020 thanks to "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood — and you've also seen the Hollywood heavyweight in huge films like "The Departed," "Django Unchained," "The Great Gatsby," "Inception," and Martin Scorsese's recent masterpiece "Killers of the Flower Moon." As of this writing, nobody else who ever appeared on "Roseanne" has won an Oscar, but there's still hope for Laurie Metcalf and John Goodman, at the very least.

Blink and you'll miss Bruce Willis in the 1982 courtroom drama "The Verdict" — if you look closely, he's in the courtroom audience on the right side of the above photo. Willis' first on-screen appearance — which was also uncredited — actually happened two years prior in "The First Deadly Sin" (he's a guy going into a diner), but he's far more visible in "The Verdict," Sidney Lumet and David Mamet's adaptation of Barry Reed's novel. If you're not super familiar with the movie, it's certainly worth watching even if you can't find Willis' face in the crowd; it stars Paul Newman and earned an Oscar nod for the late actor as well as nominations for Best Picture, Best Director for Lumet, and Best Adapted Screenplay for Mamet.

Willis is, of course, one of the most iconic action stars in Hollywood history — in 1988, he starred as John McClane in the action hit "Die Hard," and the rest is history. Willis continued playing McLane in the "Die Hard" franchise for years, pairing the action-packed movies with comedies like "Look Who's Talking" (and its sequel) and Quentin Tarantino's masterpiece "Pulp Fiction." Sadly, Willis is no longer performing; in 2022, he and his family — including his ex-wife, actor Demi Moore — revealed that Willis is suffering from frontotemporal dementia, a fatal brain condition that causes severe speech difficulties. If you set out to do a Willis movie marathon to honor the star and you want to include absolutely everything, you might as well go ahead and include "The Verdict."

In 1987, future superstar Brad Pitt appeared in four movies without getting any credit — "No Man's Land," "Less than Zero," "No Way Out," and "Hunk." In the latter, Pitt shows up behind star John Allen Nelson drinking on a beach next to his lady friend, and chronologically, it's his first-ever on-screen role. Unfortunately for Nelson and his "Hunk" co-stars, the shirtless guy in the background of one scene would become a household name (and I say unfortunately because none of them ever reached the heights of Pitt's career).

Pitt burst onto the scene in 1991's "Thelma and Louise" as a young hunk (I had to) who seduces and robs Geena Davis' Thelma — and, by proxy, Susan Sarandon's Louise — and from then on, it was off to the races. "A River Runs Through It" followed shortly thereafter, as did hits like "True Romance," "Interview with a Vampire," "Seven," "Twelve Monkeys," "Fight Club," "Ocean's Eleven" (and its two sequels), "Mr. & Mrs. Smith," "Babel," "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," "Inglourious Basterds," and "Moneyball," just to name a few. In 2020, Pitt won his first-ever acting Oscar for Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood," where he plays a supporting role alongside fellow former background actor Leonardo DiCaprio, and his production company "Plan B" has produced award-winning films like "Moonlight" and "Women Talking" as well as the 2024 sequel "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice." It's safe to say Pitt is plenty busy; he probably doesn't have much time to lounge around on a beach behind a titular hunk anymore.