There is a movie star walking the halls of the Bromfield School. Well, almost.

With this year being the 36th anniversary of the summer movie thriller, Jaws, it’s fitting to call out Russell Wass, the head of the Bromfield math department and a longtime math teacher, who appeared briefly in the 1975 Academy Award-winning classic. His brush with fame will come as no surprise to many of his students, who spend time every day in his movie-poster-filled classroom, and may have even heard him speak of his moment on the big screen.

According to Wass, he and his family vacationed on Martha’s Vineyard every summer when he was a child. In 1974, when he was 11 years old, Steven Spielberg was filming Jaws on the island. Wass says, “There were signs all around asking for people to show up at the State Beach near the ‘Big Bridge’ that connected Oak Bluffs to Edgartown to be in a scene, so that’s what I did.”

Jaws caused many people to rethink swimming in the ocean, with its tale of an enormous great white shark terrorizing the small, fictional town of Amity, situated somewhere on the northeast Atlantic coast, during the town’s tourist-attracting Fourth of July weekend. The beast kills three people before the town fathers get serious about stopping it and send three men to kill the monstrous shark, estimated to be 20 to 30 feet long. In one scene, the shark swims past a tourist-crowded beach into a lagoon, where it overturns a rowboat and kills a man. All we see of the man after the attack is his unattached leg, floating to the bottom of the lagoon. For viewers who still have their wits about them after this shock, a closer look at the scene will reveal a brief glimpse of 11-year-old Wass, one of the onlookers in the background.

For such a short appearance, Wass says he had to spend a long time on the beach. “The thing I remember most was getting a bad sunburn and having to run in and out of the water many, many times. I also remember a lot of talk during the summer about the difficulty they were having in getting the mechanical shark to work properly.”

Jaws eventually picked up Oscars for editing, its original score, and sound. The only Oscar it was nominated for but didn’t win was Best Picture.

Wass, meanwhile, retired from acting after his first and only movie. As he explains, seeing the movie “added ‘fear of swimming in the ocean’ to my list of phobias.” The early 1970s were a particularly influential time for him, as Airport (1970) gave him his fear of flying and The Poseidon Adventure (1974) contributed to his fear of ocean liner travel. Nevertheless, his accomplishment is a unique one among the Bromfield community.