Familiar Faces: Debbi Burns

Debbi Burns is the neighbor nobody suspects.

“People would never guess when I shop at Harris Teeter, Food Lion, or Trader Joe’s,” she says, “that I am an actor and a model in advertising. I don’t really talk about it very much.”

Despite appearing in more than 100 films and television productions as a background actor, earning her SAG card, and landing print campaigns for national brands, the Cary resident still goes largely unidentified.

Debbi’s double life started around 2004, when she applied for extra work using materials originally gathered for her son Ryan’s youth acting seminars. When Ryan graduated and she was no longer working, Debbi remembers thinking, “Oh, you know what? Let me look into that” — and then actually took the plunge.

Her first credited scene came on The Break-Up, starring Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston, where she can be spotted riding on the top of a double-decker tour bus in the film’s opening. “That was really thrilling,” Debbi says about being on screen alongside Vaughn.

Debbi never tires of flipping open a magazine or recognizing her own face on the cover.

From there, the credits started to stack up. Debbi appeared on another bus with Will Ferrell in Stranger than Fiction, worked as a featured extra in The Poker House — Jennifer Lawrence’s first lead role — and went on to background work on television shows Chicago P.D., Chicago Med, and Chicago Fire.

One of Debbi’s most memorable shoots was Stranger than Fiction, where she remembers being struck by Ferrell’s discipline: “He’s such a method actor, he never looked away from his papers,” she says. “What you see on the screen is how he was all day long.” And it was a long day, with the scene taking approximately 10 hours to shoot.

Along the way, Debbi earned her SAG card through an unusual path: three separate union-affiliated bookings, the last one when a production she was already working on converted to a union shoot mid-shoot. “I think mine is rare,” she says. “It doesn’t happen a lot.” Debbi’s background work also counterintuitively leaves a public trail: She has her own page on the Internet Movie Database, searchable under her name.

When she and her husband, Mark, relocated to Cary about a decade ago for a work transfer, Debbi had to leave her Chicago talent agency behind. Starting over felt like “a whole new path,” but Debbi has learned to not have any expectations. “You can only try,” she says. Her first North Carolina job was a two-day shoot for a Billy Graham retreat video in Asheville, and she’s been booked on a music video and appears in the film Raleigh, I Kinda Like You, available on Prime.

Ask Debbi her favorite kind of work, and she doesn’t hesitate: reenactments, the kind that fill true-crime programming and shows like American Greed, where she steps in to portray someone who has died. There are no lines to memorize, and unlike open-call extra work, she knows she’s actually been chosen. “As an extra, if you are seen, it’s exciting … but there’s a chance you’re not even going to be seen.”

Her print and modeling work spans an equally wide range: lifestyle modeling for Travelon bags and Eaglewood Resort; knitting and crochet spreads for Prime Publications, the Illinois-based publisher she still works with when possible; and travel and visitor guides covering stretches of Route 66.

A long-held goal came true when her Chicago agent landed her a direct booking, no audition required, for WeatherTech floor liners. The ad for a brand she already used and loved later turned up, without warning, in both Popular Mechanics and Car and Driver. “Mark’s friend Steve called and said, I think I just saw Debbi in Popular Mechanics,” she shares. “It was a full page of me in the magazine.”

Stock photography has produced some of Debbi’s most unexpected sightings, including a vein clinic commercial built from footage she’d filmed years earlier. “I remember doing the stock photography, stills, for a photographer … and they used it in a vein clinic commercial,” she says. “So then I have to tell my friends that my veins are just fine!”

Debbi’s also had three personal essays published in Woman’s World, including one about discovering, by pure coincidence, that her family’s old Chicago-area mail carrier who’d mysteriously disappeared had relocated to North Carolina and ended up sitting next to Mark on an airplane to Raleigh.

Through it all, Debbi says she’s learned to hold her ambitions loosely. “If I work on something or apply for something, I forget about it,” she explains. “Because if you get it, you get it.”

These days, with Mark retired and travel calling more than any single role, that philosophy suits her fine. “I still can work if I find jobs,” she says, “but I like to be able to just get up and go.”

(And stay mostly incognito.)