When Rumala Sheikhani started accounting on shows like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, she was processing extras’ paperwork — the timecards, or vouchers, for daily job bookings — by manually calculating payouts in Excel spreadsheets. “You have 500 people showing up to set for one day and leaving, so it’s really hard to keep track of their paperwork and make sure they’ve filled it out. These are W-4s, I-9s, complicated tax paperwork,” she says.
Sheikhani, who began her career at pro services giants PwC and Ernst & Young before stints in production accounting at Searchlight Pictures and NBCUniversal, took those hourslong paperwork days and launched her own firm with a focus on streamlining the pay process specifically for background actors.
That company, Everyset, was launched in early 2016 with the name Castifi (it rebranded in 2022, with the aim to better reflect the entire production team on film and TV projects). Founded alongside Ebrahim Bhaiji, who had been working on the tech and product side of NFL Media before joining as CEO, Everyset focused on pitching background actor management software — digital vouchers to manage workflow for extras on sets.
It didn’t click at first. “We started working with SAG-AFTRA to build out all of these union calculations to do all the things needed to create a digital voucher and starting getting it out there,” Sheikhani says. “This was pre-pandemic. Got a lot of ‘No’s’ from a lot of studios and productions. Everyone in the industry was like ‘there’s no way we’re going to go digital, we’re fine with paper.’”
Then COVID-19 hit, the guilds agreed on a raft of set safety protocols and all jobs across Hollywood saw some benefits in a Zoom-ified digital overhaul built out of the practicalities of the early 2020s. Now the Los Angeles-based Everyset has about 50-plus employees and studio clients that include Netflix, Amazon, HBO, Paramount, Skydance and Apple. Its tech and background casting software was used on Sean Baker’s Oscar winner Anora, Amazon MGM’s Challengers, Apple TV+’s Severance and Prime Video’s The Summer I Turned Pretty, among other projects.
For its next phase, Everyset is getting venture backing for an expansion, raising $9 million in new funding in a round led by Bay Area VC Crosslink Capital and early-stage firm Haven Ventures to jump from being a software provider to become a background actor payroll company itself in the short-term W-2 processing space.
In doing so, it’ll look to compete more with the likes of Central Casting, the 100-year-old Hollywood icon (think: “Straight out of Central Casting”) that has led the space and is part of the industry payroll giant Entertainment Partners. “Previously we were just organizing people to work on set, casting them and providing them these vouchers and then we would send it over to a payroll company,” Bhaiji says. “We raised these funds to turn ourselves into a background payroll company.”
Processing extras’ job bookings has helped give Everyset a window in to where work is now, as Hollywood grapples with major studios cutting the number of annual big theatrical bets and shortening TV episode orders from the Peak TV days of just a few years ago.
There’s some interesting trendlines going on at the big production hubs. Georgia, which has a generous film and TV tax incentive program given it does not cap its allotment of state dollars, is now processing the most extras’ job bookings in Everyset’s dataset.
California (which just raised its annual film and TV incentive cap to $750 million), trails just behind and runs almost even with New York. Rising powerhouse New Jersey — which is the only state to see its overall production levels jump this year, per tracker ProdPro — follows. And then there’s Illinois, home to four Dick Wolf procedurals on NBC (Chicago Fire, P.D., Med, and Justice) that stage the type of big broadcast action set pieces involving background actors, which has seen soaring year-over-year growth in extras’ jobs booked and may be poised to be a bigger production player.
“For the past couple years, we saw just a downward trend during the streaming wars,” Bhaiji observes of production trendlines, before mentioning a silver lining. “Now with the tax incentives in New Jersey and New York, and with California coming back online, we’re seeing the work come back in a dramatic fashion. We’re seeing almost 30 percent month-over-month in job growth right now on the background performers side.” Everyset processes about 15,000 background actor jobs a month across the country on features and TV projects.
Whether that pace can keep up is an open question. There’s a number of well-funded artificial intelligence startups that implicitly (and ominously) promise to do away with Hollywood sets as the industry knows them and instead offer, say, cheap versions of AI-generated crowds with some prompts in post-production. For now though, “it’s still less expensive to hire a person,” Bhaiji notes, as far as the studio projects which still aim for top-level production values.
For Everyset, a longterm goal is an additional fundraise to expand beyond background actors to start competing as a full-service payroll firm specializing in short-term W-2. If that happened, it would put the company in more direct competition with Entertainment Partners, as well as payroll giants like Cast & Crew, and other talent and crew providers like Greenslate, which also touts itself as an “alternative to legacy, paper-driven systems that have stifled production efficiency since the 1970s” as a pitch.
“We’re on S.W.A.T. Exiles right now for Sony,” Everyset’s CEO Bhaiji adds. “They have 3,000 people that are gearing up for work on the extras space — from bodyguards to cops to S.W.A.T. Our system organizes all this seamlessly for the people who are set up to work and for the production company that’s hiring us, and then its all tied to timecards and payroll.”
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