You may remember him from...

Walter Bryk was an extra in dozens of Winnipeg-shot film and TV productions; his daughter and grandson also got in on the 'action!'

By: Alan Small

Whenever a movie or a television show was being filmed in Winnipeg from the late 1980s to the mid-2000s, chances are Walter Bryk was in it. 

Bryk wasn’t a superstar actor or an up-and-coming director or one of the many Winnipeggers who work behind the scenes in Manitoba’s fast-growing movie industry. He was an extra. Extras are the background scenery in movies and television shows. When the star walks down a busy sidewalk, extras walk the other way. If an extra makes a scene in a movie, don’t blink. Their moment on the silver screen or the TV is usually gone in a flash.

As an extra, Bryk went the extra mile, working in or appearing in dozens of movies and TV shows, and even enjoyed playing culprits in Crime Stoppers re-enactments broadcast locally.

During his career, Bryk was shot by Oscar-nominated actor Danny Aiello in 2004’s Zeyda and the Hitman. He wore turn-of-the-century costumes for episodes of Murdoch Mysteries. He rubbed shoulders on sets with actors such as Ed Asner, Jennifer Tilly, Lou Diamond Phillips and Patrick Swayze.

And he was Al Waxman’s stand-in during the film Mob Story. 

Bryk was ideally suited to step in for the actor during the 1989 movie. Like the King of Kensington — the role that launched Waxman’s career — it would be easy to imagine that when the sociable Bryk walked down the street, he’d smile at everyone.

"He would always like to strike up a conversation," says daughter Char Winram who, like her father, has also been a movie extra. "He would always recognize somebody.

"He was kind of like a Norm from Cheers."

Bryk’s curiosity, gift of the gab and knack for being at the right place at the right time led to him getting the Mob Story role.

"He took me down with him and there was a long lineup, Winram recalls. "He was always wanting to see what was going on, so he left me in line, and by the time he came back he said someone noticed him and he went on to be the stand-in for Al Waxman. She was in Grade 6 when the film was being shot and both father and daughter appeared in what the now 43-year-old calls "a classic Canadian mob movie."

Perhaps Bryk’s most notable role was in the 2002 ESPN film Season on the Brink, starring Brian Dennehy as volcanic Indiana University basketball coach Bobby Knight. 

The docudrama begins with the depiction of one of Knight’s most notorious on-court eruptions. Two bad calls go against Indiana in a 1985 Big Ten showdown with Purdue and a furious Knight is given a technical foul for arguing. He is later ejected after hurling his chair across the court in anger.

Bryk appears to be portraying Indiana athletic director Ralph Floyd — he wears a tan-coloured jacket similar to the one Floyd had on during the actual incident — and gets a couple of seconds as the focal point of a shot, arguing with a referee, and then beside Dennehy in another, before the sequence ends.

For an extra, it’s as plum a role as one can expect. But like virtually all extras, Bryk had no lines and his name isn’t on the credits at the end of the movie. 

He does have a tangible legacy though, beyond the collection of videotapes of films he worked on over the years. The Internet Movie Database catalogues the names of actors, crew members and shooting locations of films made since the beginning of the silver screen. Typing Walter Bryk into its search engine gets one hit: "utility stand-in" for the 2005 comedy Big White, starring Robin Williams, Holly Hunter and Woody Harrelson.

Being a movie extra — with its tedious hours waiting for a brief scene appearance — proved to be a good fit for Bryk, especially after his wife, Olive, died in September 1997, Winram says. Walter had long since retired from his job in human resources with the provincial government.

He was born and raised in the North End. His family ran Bryk’s Grocery Store at the corner of Stella Avenue and McKenzie Street, now the site of Immaculate Heart Playground, says his brother Robert. 

In the 1950s, Bryk worked in Churchill before landing a higher-paying supply job with ITT during the construction of the DEW Line in Iqaluit, known then as Frobisher Bay. The Distant Early Warning Line was a series of radar stations built across the Arctic as part of NATO’s defence against the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

"He would be logging what was coming in and what was going out," Winram says. "That’s where he met my mom. She was in communications and he would have to book an appointment to call home, and that’s how he met mom. That’s how it all started."

Olive and Walter were married in 1958 and moved to Montreal before Walter, still with ITT, but now in personnel, was transferred to Winnipeg in 1961. He began his career with the province in 1973 and the couple settled in Charleswood.

In his final years, Bryk was diagnosed with dementia, which ended his movie-extra exploits, and he died last October at age 84, shortly after being diagnosed with bile duct cancer.

He shared the fun of being a movie extra with his daughter and, last summer, his teenage grandson Gavin Winram joined the family pastime, working on the movie Flag Day, directed by Sean Penn; the film hasn’t been released yet.

Bryk couldn’t see him on the set, but it would have been a proud moment, Char Winram says.

"If he could have been there, he’d have been ecstatic." 

alan.small@freepress.mb.ca  

Twitter:@AlanDSmall