Small-budget, crowdfunded film projects don’t have a ton of options when it comes to casting actors with recognizable names. Without money to entice high-profile performers, directors and producers have to hope some Hollywood A, B, or C-lister is passionate enough about their movie’s subject to work on the cheap. Luckily for the creators of the Kevin Smith biopic Shooting Clerks, currently in production after running a $3,500 Indiegogo campaign back in June, they’ve found someone with an abiding love of Kevin Smith to cameo in their movie: Writer, director, and actor Kevin Smith.
Smith took time off from his busy schedule of podcasting, retiring, and trawling Craigslist for movie premises to appear in the film, which centers on the his efforts to film his breakout 1994 film Clerks on a $27,000 budget. Momentarily freed from the burden of self-mythologizing his freshman effort, Smith will appear in the film both as a narrator and in a cameo as Canadian reporter Larkin Eve, whose name is an anagram for “Real Kevin.” (Also “Reveal Ink”and “A Riven Elk,” although it’s possible that those are just coincidences and not references to Smith’s secret tattoo and elk-splitting hobbies.)