WELCOME TO THE CURIOUS, HIGH-FLYING WORLD OF STAND-INS, WHERE YOU CAN BECOME MERYL STREEP OR SPIDER-MAN FOR A DAY, THEN GO HOME WITHOUT DRAWING A SECOND LOOK

WORDS AMELIA TAIT

In 1992, when Ben Hannen was a bored geography student lazing away his summer holidays, he received a phone call that would ultimately lead him to share bathwater with Danny DeVito 25 years later. The call was from his aunt — she had heard a radio advert appealing for men of a certain height needed for an upcoming feature film. Hannen travelled to London’s Mayfair and was scrutinised by a single individual in a hotel’s vast function room. He got the job, and spent seven weeks on the set of 1993’s The Secret Garden, starring Maggie Smith. But Hannen didn’t appear in the finished film; his name was not listed in the credits.

Hannen, now 49, is what’s known as a “stand-in”, a person with a similar height, build and complexion to an actor, who literally stands in their place while the camera and lighting crew set up a shot. Unlike body doubles — whose limbs, shoulders and backs-of-heads are deliberately caught on camera — stand-ins aren’t seen on screen; the role involves rehearsing, blocking, and sometimes learning actors’ lines. Hannen, who is 5’ 1”, stood in for a young actor on The Secret Garden because British employment laws limit the hours that children can work (meanwhile, adult stand-ins work some of the longest hours in the industry — one says she regularly works 6pm Friday until 10am Saturday, a shift nicknamed ‘Fraturday’).

After his star-studded summer, Hannen returned to university before going into PR. But in 2010, bored of “the bureaucracy, the general tittle-tattle of office life”, he joined an extras agency and became the stand-in for young Snape (Benedict Clarke) in Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows — Part 2. In the coming years, Hannen did stand-in gigs while also working as a precision driver for vehicles that appear on screen. Then, in 2017, he was cast as Danny DeVito’s stand-in on Disney’s Dumbo. “It was just jaw-droppingly exciting to be literally in this world of [director] Tim Burton’s mind,” he says.

And, yes — the role involved sitting in a hot tub while pretending to be DeVito’s character, circus owner Max Medici. “To set up that scene, I was sitting in this quite cosy, warm metal bathtub with all these crew around,” Hannen recalls. “And to think that I step out and then Danny’s in the same bathwater as me — that sort of thing was very fun.” But the job is far more than anecdote fodder; the occupational hazards are far greater than a few pruney fingertips. What’s it really like to be a stand-in, part of a film’s so-called ‘second team’? How does it feel to do so much work for so little glory?