Last month, I found myself standing under the pier in Eastbourne at 7am along with 300 other people. The weary yawns of the early morning had soon disintegrated and we found ourselves embroiled in a physical fight. We were all screaming things at each other that our mothers would be ashamed of and it was cold – jolly cold. I grew more and more disdainful of my outfit, not for it’s lack of insulation, but for its downright frumpiness. We carried on fighting until 6pm. I don’t think I’ve exercised so much in my life, but before you jump to conclusions that I’m some kind of thug who’s into gang violence, I’m not. This was all staged and I got paid to split both my knees open (which I did, honest to God. I’ve not had knees like this since I was eight year’s old).

Attenborough in the original Brighton Rock

At the end of October, I was cast as ‘22^nd Mod Girl’ for the remake of the 1947 film, Brighton Rock. Like the pedant I tend to be, I’m quick to remind people that the original film, which launched Richard Attenborough’s thesp career, was based on the 1939 book of the same name by Graham Greene. The new film, directed by Rowan Joffe, is set in 1964 when the rift between Britain’s mods and rockers was at its peak. Thus, the reason why 300 of us were scrapping on the beach at an unholy time on a Friday morning.

I had to wake up at 4am to be on-set on time. Seriously, man: the only time I’ve ever seen 4am is when I’ve not gone to bed yet. When I go abroad – which is frustratingly rare – I always book my flights so that I don’t have to get up at hellish-o’clock. Moaning aside (although I was useless the next day and my eyes looked like they belonged to a cadaver), it was pretty exciting standing right next to the new Pinkie Brown: namely, Sam Riley, the dude who played Ian Curtis in the 2007 film Control. He totally smiled at me, I swear.

The film, which also stars Helen Mirren and Pete Postlethwaite, is due for release next autumn, so there’s quite a wait to go before you catch me sauntering about the crowd, in all my modernist glory. That is, if my turn as an extra hasn’t ended up on the cutting room floor…

Sure, it’s all very exciting being an extra in a film, but that aside, what grips me is Joffe’s choice to set his interpretation of the story in 1964: “We’re making Brighton Rock as contemporary as we possibly can because the story feels ‘modern’. It’s too alive, too vibrant and too relevant to be contained in the late 1930s.” Further to this, one eager blogger on Flimstalker remarks that, “The reason that the setting is in 1964 is to take advantage of a gang era of that time, the Mods and the Rockers.” And let’s not forget, folks, that the last year that the death penalty was issued in Britain was – yup – in 1964, a fact that’s pretty important to Pinkie Brown’s plight in the story.

Further filming a couple of days later, thankfully for my knees, was much more suave. Indeed, blink and you’ll probably miss me, but I am there, on the back of a Lambretta, one of around 70 scooters that were booked to make up the critical and oh-so threatening descent of the mods onto Brighton’s seafront. Despite the whoop-ass headache I got from the two stroke fumes, I had myself a time. But the scene was so familiar: in fact, a number of my fellow extras forgot that the film wasn’t a remake of Quadrophenia.

Quadropheniacs

Further to this, a large proportion of the chaps that made up the mod boys in the crowd were actually real-life, bona fide, do-yer-hair mods. Having traveled from all corners of the country (I think Liverpool was the most northerly origin of one camel coated mod’s pilgrimage), these guys were the real Parka wearing deal. Brandishing scooters with more mirrors than any of us RIH readers could possibly whish to have when applying our lipstick and hairspray, these boys lived, breathed and talked everything mod. My favourite soundbite was in the queue for lunch, where a group of four Harrington clad groovies were genuinely beasting up a bunch of rockers. There were real vendettas going on. This really wasn’t an act; it was a way of life.

With that in mind, I’ve always touted Shane Meadows’s film of 2007, This Is England, as a vague follow-up to Quadrophenia. After all, it’s just as much an exploration of ‘a way of life’. And there’s a story I wasn’t aware of until I was sitting in hair and make-up: apparently, Thomas Turgoose, the 13 year old who played Shaun in Meadows’s film originally auditioned as an extra for This Is England. There’s always hoping, but it would seem I failed to wow Brighton Rock’s production team so my stellar acting career will have to wait. So for now at least, you’ll have to put up with me blustering all over Running In Heels. But by all means, hit me back for an autograph and I’ll be happy to oblige.