It took a while to get there. After that first onscreen fashion-video gig (a job that compensated more in pizza than in actual cash), I worked three days as an extra on a movie filming in New Jersey starring Queen Latifah and Common. I was confused and skeptical (but excited) about how simple it seemed to get work on a movie: I’d emailed a couple of candid photos to an ambiguous-sounding email address and received a terse response with a check-in number and information on when and where to show up. I arrived to find that I’d be playing a Nets fan alongside almost a thousand other people, providing stadium-worthy cheers and boos in the background of the action sequences being filmed on the basketball court below.

I didn’t expect to do more than that (the hours on that movie set were long and involved a lot of sitting and waiting around), but when another “real” job offer fell through at the last minute, I signed up—in a fit of frustration—for an account on an industry casting site. It was temporary, I told myself. It would be the equivalent of an aspiring actress holding down a waitressing job, except in reverse. Rather then waiting tables in between scrambling off to auditions, I’d be wandering around in the background of 30 Rock episodes. Or playing a haughty party guest mingling at a Gossip Girl socialite shindig. Or dressed up as a Prohibition-era lady of the night and sitting on a gangster’s lap on Boardwalk Empire. (These are all things I ended up doing.)

It seemed a wild way to get off unemployment and regain some financial stability, but it worked. While I wasn’t making tons of money—on the basketball movie, I got $85 per day—I could sometimes get rate bumps based on whether I was bringing along props (a stroller, to play a young mom) or driving my own car in a scene.

There were many posts I couldn’t apply for, though, unless I was a union member: specifically, stand-in jobs, which paid better (at the time, almost double the non-union extra rate). Stand-ins are hired based on body type, skin tone, hair color, and height; they’re meant to match an actor for lighting and camera set-ups. As the actor rehearses a scene, the stand-in watches, then goes through the motions for the camera and lighting departments while the actor gets hair, makeup, and wardrobe touchups. Did the actor drop a file? Start to dance? Open a door with their left or right hand? A stand-in mimics each detail. It’s a practice valued for its efficiency, as it saves the production time and money: By rehearsing cues, all departments are prepped to shoot as soon as an actor is deemed camera-ready.

To get there, I had to find a way to join one of the two actors’ unions. I was able to buy a membership into the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, and then made it my mission to find a way into the more elusive Screen Actors Guild. (In 2012, the two unions merged to create SAG-AFTRA.) The standard way was to be cast in a part with dialogue, but without an agent I was basically left with the three waiver rule—if you were lucky enough to get put on a production that was short of fulfilling their daily obligation of union hires, you could get bumped up as a union member for the day. If it happened three times, you became eligible to pay the union initiation fee and join SAG.