The odds were ever in favor of this instructor
So Angie Huffstetler works at Georgia Highlands College’s Douglasville and Paulding sites. She's an instructor of physical education. Oh, and her co-worker is... Jennifer Lawrence.
Let's back up. Angie is also in what you might call the “movie business.”
In 2013, Angie was an extra in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 (2014) where she shared screen time with J-Law herself. Go ahead. Watch the movie. Pause it at about 30 minutes and 46 seconds to see her and Jennifer Lawrence sharing the silver screen together.
“My husband knew what a huge fan of the books I was,” she said. “He was reading an online Atlanta news column that said a casting company (CL Casting) was looking for skinny, pale individuals to be extras in the Hunger Games trilogy.”
Angie submitted a few pictures and her basic height, weight, age information, and after only 45 minutes the casting agency booked her for three days of shooting in December 2013.
“The day after I was ‘hired’ as an extra I had to go to Screen Gems studio in Atlanta for a wardrobe fitting,” she said. “I didn't actually know any details after that until the day before filming. They were very secretive about everything to prevent leakage about the film.”
Come mid-December, Angie was instructed to go to Newnan, Georgia, where a set was built in an old factory.
“The night before a filming day, the extras would get an email telling us where to drive to and what time to be there. Filming days were about 14 to 16 hours long. Once I arrived at the parking location for extras, a bus would then take us to the actual filming location.”
Angie said there were over 400 people cast as extras for the District 13 scenes. Each extra was ushered into wardrobe and then to hair and makeup. After that, it was show time. The director and production assistants placed each person where they wanted him or her in the scene.
Angie found herself on set with Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, Elizabeth Banks, Willow Shields, Sam Clafin, Liam Hemsworth, and even the main star herself Jennifer Lawrence.
Don’t be too jealous. Angie said a lot of it was luck.
“I was very lucky, as there were over 400 extras and very few of us actually got good screen time and were able to be recognized in the movie,” she said. “A lot of the friends I made on set were never visible in the movie.”
But what luck!
Angie said she and her friends held their own special red carpet ceremony after the movie released in late November 2014, where some of her best friends from college actually flew into town to go see the movie with her.
“It was pretty darn amazing,” she said. “It was so neat to see how a movie is actually made. Just to film one scene could take over 10 hours due to having to shoot the scene from so many angles.”
So if you happen to bump into Angie at GHC and she’s not being hounded by the paparazzi, you might be able to convince her to introduce you to J-Law one day.
“I always joke now that Jennifer Lawrence is my ‘coworker,’” she says, “since we were in the same scene together, after all.”