The Secret Lives of Martinos Folk: Karen Dervin faces 'The Judge' with Robert Downey, Jr.

By: 
Gary Boas
October 10, 2014

It’s a late summer day and Karen Dervin, the NMR Core administrator with the Martinos Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, is sitting in a makeshift courtroom in an old warehouse on the South Shore of Boston. Robert Downey, Jr. is there; Downey is no stranger to courtrooms. So is veteran actor Robert Duvall. Emotions occasionally run high, maybe during cross-examination of a witness, or maybe as a son struggles to find good in an estranged father. The air feels heavy.

For a couple of weeks last August, Karen Dervin worked as an extra on the set of "The Judge," a comedy-drama starring Robert Downey, Jr. and Robert Duvall. The shoot was fascinating, she says. And the movie, which opens today, is an exciting addition to her resume.

But this was by no means her only acting achievement. Far from it, in fact.

Karen was bitten by the acting bug early on when the pre-school she was in put on a show for family and friends. She climbed on stage that day and never looked back. All through school she continued to follow the proverbial muse in theater, music and dance. She received the Drama Award at 8th grade graduation, was a member of the all-state and all-New England choruses in high school, and received a music award at high school graduation. She kept her foot in the water in college and, after finishing graduate school, threw herself into community theater.

Today she’s as busy as she’s ever been. In the past year alone she directed two original short plays for theater festivals and performed in two others.

She loves the contrast to her day job this work provides. “The ability to create something that grows and changes every time it is performed is amazing,” she says, “especially when you are working with others with the same creative vision and the same sense of fun, or ‘play,’ if you will.”

The Martinos Center's Karen Dervin

You won’t only find Karen on the stage. In the early 2000s, when new tax breaks for film companies led to more filming in the Boston/Providence area, she also started working as an extra on TV and in movies.

This is an entirely different endeavor. “Being selected as an extra really has nothing to do with acting ability,” she says. “It is all about whether you fit the ‘look’ of the film. For larger shoots, it’s really just about being reliable and available.” The fun in working as an extra, she adds, is really in being able to see all the behind-the-scenes wrangling involved in making movie magic. “It is incredible how much work goes into just a few seconds of film.”

Of course, there’s also a kind of satisfaction in watching talented people doing what they do best. With "The Judge," this was true with those in front of the camera (the stellar cast includes Downey, Duvall, Billy Bob Thornton, Vincent D’Onofrio and Ken Howard) as well as behind (Janus Kaminski won cinematography Oscars for "Schindler’s List" and "Saving Private Ryan").

Karen continues to keep busy. Since filming the courtroom scenes for "The Judge," she has shot two TV movies for German television. In one of these she played a patient in a rehab facility. The other was an outdoor shoot where she got to be both a dockworker and a customer buying lobster.

And now? She’s looking forward to seeing "The Judge"; she would check it out even if she weren’t in it, she says. After that she has auditions to prepare for, and she’s gearing up to direct a full-length play and a short in a festival this winter.