Edgar Wright remembers riling up one zombie extra too much while making Shaun of the Dead, prompting him to bite the director’s leg.
Hey, Edgar, you’ve got red on you. Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright had quite a task ahead of him in making his breakout hit, but he probably didn’t bank on a horde of zombie extras going full Romero on him. But that’s just what happened during production of the classic zom-com, something he may have inadvertently prompted himself.
In a new oral history via IndieWire, Edgar Wright recalled that he had some additional sound work to get done to add to the zombification of the citizens of London, with one extra going a bit too far with his contributions. “We were taking a sound recording because we needed zombie noise, just audio only. I was sort of conducting them, and in one take, I said, “OK, come in and attack me!” And of course, they all did and maybe because they felt so cooped up — they’d been on set waiting to be used for days – one of them came at me and bit my leg. The camera’s not even running but he goes straight down and he bites my leg. He was really method: he’d gone deep! I think the zombies had gone feral!”
But faux zombies weren’t the only non-human entities to attack the Shaun of the Dead set: that’s right, teenagers came after the cast and crew with stones and eggs in assaults that became so frequent and disruptive that Wright just gave them jobs at zombies, a tactic that seemed to work.
Twenty years on, Shaun of the Dead remains one of the funniest movies of the century, a non-stop display of laughs and blood, with a little bit of Prince thrown in. Added to that, it has a memorable story of friendship throughout, with plenty of satirical digs at British culture and general consumerism. It might not be Simon Pegg’s favorite of the Cornetto Trilogy (that goes to The World’s End), but I – like many of our readers – would rank it as #1 myself.
What is your favorite scene in Shaun of the Dead? Where would it rank for you in the Cornetto Trilogy? Let us know below!
