BATON ROUGE — "Creed" and "Black Panther" filmmaker Ryan Coogler's newest film "Sinners" is a Louisiana-shot vampire film centered on Michael B. Jordan playing dual roles as twin brothers returning to Jim Crow-era Mississippi after World War I. 

Another pair of brothers — Amite natives Devin and Dante Dotey — played a small part during the film's 2024 production, which included a stint in Donaldsonville.

It was the boys’ own brotherly connection that drew them to sign up to be extras on the Warner Brothers production that also stars Delroy Lindo, Hailee Steinfeld and Jack O’Connell.

Devin, a 21-year-old Jackson State University civil engineering student, said that one of his professors told his class about the opportunity to be extras in the film. His interest was piqued by a fun experience to share with his brother. It was only later that the pair realized the film was starring megastars like Jordan, which only sweetened the deal for them.

"We both wanted to be actors," Devin said. "So I sent it to him and said 'Let's just do it, it should be fun. We've got nothing to do during the summer.'"

Both young men have performance experience. Devin is a stage actor who is also the president of the MADD Drama Performance Troupe at Jackson State. Dante, a 20-year-old computer engineering student at LSU, has done a couple of plays over the last few years, as well as acting in a yet-to-be-picked-up television series during the pandemic. 

The Doteys were two of around 200 extras on the set of the film and were inseparable during shooting, leading to a fitting nickname they received on set for a film about twins: "The Brothers."

"I wouldn't call it a coincidence, but I think it's a pretty cool thing that the movie is about these brothers and (the crew) is calling us The Brothers," Dante said. 

While they were only on set for three full days of shooting of more than 12 hours, they were called to be used several times, the brothers said, saying they were always by each other's side.

They were even used to help queue Steinfeld's vampiric seductress Mary into her scenes. Devin said that he didn't even recognize the "Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse" and "Pitch Perfect 3" star until they started talking during filming. 

"She was in character, so it was hard to really see who she was," Dante said about the actress, who is dressed in flapper attire and can be seen in trailers covered in blood. 

The Dotey brothers joked that during a scene set on railroad tracks, they kept trying to step into the camera's eye to make it into the final film. 

"As extras, we're always never talked about after movies are released. But we play a big part," Devin said, adding that he and his brother continued their work as extras on the Zendaya and Robert Pattinson film "The Drama" releasing later this year. 

While the Doteys only filmed during scenes shot in Bogalusa and New Orleans, WBRZ videographer Charles Jones was there during the entire production as a location assistant primarily in New Orleans, as well as St. Bernard and Lafourche parishes.

In the capital region, the crew spent a three-day stretch in Donaldsonville where the town's historic downtown was sent a century into the past when it was transformed into a Jim Crow-era Mississippi town. 

"It was truly special," Jones said, praising not only Coogler's direction but also the close proximity in which the locations department worked with the art department. "I think a lot of people are gonna see how hard that work was on the screen." 

Jones' work with the locations department is not the most glamourous work on a film set; it's work that, if it's done right, goes entirely unnoticed by audiences who aren't in the know.

His department was typically the first group onto the set and the last one to leave. When the film shot was in Ascension Parish in April, his department and other behind-the-scenes crewmembers were set up for two weeks for what only amounted to three days of filming.

Jones said he and other location assistants squared away contracts with local governments to allow Coogler's film to film there and facilitate things like road closures from local law enforcement. 

Jones has worked in the locations departments on the Apple TV+ series "Blackbird," the Nicolas Cage-led Dracula comedy "Renfield" and the New Orleans leg of David Fincher's latest film "The Killer."

But "Sinners" is a special movie, he said, one that he is incredibly proud to have been even a small part of. 

"('Sinners') is genuinely one of the more imaginative and layered Hollywood blockbusters we've had in quite some time," Jones said, celebrating that an original, $90 million plus film from a director like Coogler was shot in Louisiana. "It's an original movie from an incredibly talented filmmaker with actors working at the top of their game, and I think on all levels of that movie... And I cannot recommend people to go see it enough."

A native of south Louisiana, Jones said that the period piece film, while a fantasy about vampires with all the trappings that bring, is a film that celebrates — and reckons with — the Deep South's legacy. 

The film features extended scenes of jazz and blues music that accompany Academy Award-winning composer Ludwig Göransson's score, but it also features dramatizations of the horrors Black men, women and children faced in locations like those that would later serve as the film's sets.

"There's a lot of allegories in this movie, obviously for racism because it was the South in the thirties which was not the brightest point in American history, to put it bluntly," Jones said. "I think this movie shines a light on a time and a place and a people in American history that I don't think get enough spotlight and that's blues musicians in the South."

Even standing behind the camera in shorts and a T-shirt sweating, Jones said the work crewmembers and performers like the Doteys took to recreate and pay tribute to this part of the South's history is unlike anything he has—or ever will—experience again.

"Sinners" releases this weekend, with showtimes starting Thursday evening at most theaters in the capital region. Beyond the capital region, the Prytania Theater in New Orleans is one of five locations worldwide showcasing the movie on the 70mm film it was shot on.