So I got to be an extra in Chain Reaction, in an evacuation scene towards the end of the film when a crowd of people run out of a lab building. You can't see me, though, because it was filmed from a distance. We spent all day there, standing outside in the freezing cold, doing multiple takes, and we were supposed to look like lab people who were getting out in a hurry before the building explodes, so they wanted us to wear lab coats and no winter coats over that. We said f*** that, we're not freezing to death here.

This was all taking place at the Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago http://www.anl.gov/Administration/index.html. If you look at the picture, there's a circular structure at top left. That's an atomic particle accelerator, and it is situated in a circular tunnel under the structure. We were filming in a building close to it.

So, there were several employees in the crew of extras, and somehow I got to talking with a couple of them. They turned out to be scientists who worked at the actual accelerator. One of them told me that Keanu was shooting a scene down in a tunnel that runs parallel to the accelerator. Next thing he says is: "Wanna go down and take a look?" You bet I did. So we went across a "skywalk", inside the building next to the one we were filming at, down the stairs to the basement, and there turned out to be some tunnels there, one of which connected the building to the accelerator.

So we went into a corridor, and the scientist told me that we would now go through a section that was no longer in use -- because of the high radiation levels. Oh brilliant. So we *jogged* through there, and after going though a red door that was actually a prop for the movie we got to a room that was adjacent to where they were filming. We got there between takes, and we stood in the doorway and watched them set up the next shot. Keanu sat at the far end of the set, all by himself and looking down with a "do not disturb" aura around him.

We stood there for a few minutes but nothing more happened, and I was getting nervous about not having an access pass. So we left and went back to our own shoot. The crowd of extras was so big that nobody had noticed us missing.

Anyway, nothing more happened after that. We finished the scene, and me and the other Gardener who was there (and who got me on the set) returned to the city.

Edit: here's a pic I just found of the building where we were filming. We were on the opposite side of the circular building, running down a ramp towards the parking lot. http://www.flickr.com/photos/argonne/3399186037/in/set-72157626978429514. I thought the building and the accelerator building were further apart, so the tunnels couldn't have gone directly from one building to another.

thanks for sharing the story :)

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the exact same gesture as the one Constantine does, with the bottle, to Midnight when he's in the electric chair. Yall know the one I mean?

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yeah ;)

http://youtu.be/CsWLFssykdk