‘A fun game of Spot-the-Boston-actor’: TV shows and movies cast their eyes on local theater performers – The Boston Globe

I think I’m not the one theatergoer taking part in this specific parlor recreation. As TV sequence and flicks have accomplished extra location taking pictures in and round these components, native performers have been touchdown fairly a number of components of their very own, albeit often of the blink-and-you’ll-miss them selection.

That side does give me (and I’m certain them) a little bit of a pang. Their tiny roles often don’t faucet into even a fraction of a fraction of what they’re able to. These are, in any case, the identical actors who dynamically inhabit essentially the most difficult lead roles theater has to supply.

Nonetheless, it’s a deal with when a luminary of the native stage instantly materializes onscreen, as Celeste Oliva does in HBO Max’s “Julia,” the place she performs a receptionist at WGBH-TV. Oliva additionally appeared on “SMILF,” the 2017-19 Showtime sequence set in South Boston, and within the movies “Don’t Look Up” (2021) and “The Firm Males” (2010).

Not that it’s inhibiting her native stage profession. Simply this week, Oliva’s efficiency as an internet recommendation columnist in Gloucester Stage Firm’s “Tiny Stunning Issues” earned her a nomination by the Boston Theater Critics Affiliation, of which I’m a member, for an Elliot Norton Award.

In “Julia,” a miniseries about Cambridge’s personal Julia Little one, Oliva is joined by such different acquainted faces from Boston theater as Paul Melendy, Dale Place, Kevin Fennessey, Kris Sidberry, Richard Snee, and Gene Dante. In “Don’t Look Up,” along with Oliva, there are by my rely almost a dozen actors who’ve logged important time onstage in Boston, together with Georgia Lyman, Lewis D. Wheeler, Snee, Invoice Mootos and Allyn Burrows (who can also be the inventive director at Lenox’s Shakespeare & Firm).

When Ben Affleck’s “The City” got here out in 2010, it was a gasoline to identify Boston theater stalwart Jeremiah Kissel portraying the lawyer to Rebecca Corridor’s Claire, and Lyman taking part in a waitress. That very same 12 months, Wheeler, Burrows, and Adrianne Krstansky have been among the many topnotch Boston-area actors who joined Oliva in John Wells’s “The Firm Males.” Kenneth Lonergan’s “Manchester by the Sea” (2016) featured Wheeler and Burrows within the forged.

Actors have to work, so right here’s hoping all of them proceed to get components in films and TV sequence. Right here’s hoping, too, that their roles get greater — although possibly, selfishly, not a lot greater that they depart Boston theater behind.

Don Aucoin could be reached at donald.aucoin@globe.com. Observe him on Twitter @GlobeAucoin.