by Scott Ian
It’s all in the eyes. On the set of the “Bicycle Girl” webisodes. Courtesy Scott Ian.
I asked Joe what mistakes the walker extras make on set, and he told me the biggest zombie no-no is the Frankenstein’s monster, arms up in front. That’ll get you fired from the ranks of the undead immediately.
Having graduated walker school, I was ready for my walker debut. The set was on an actual street they had closed off in the West Adams area of Los Angeles. West Adams is an old neighborhood by Los Angeles standards. It was one of the first areas developed after people started moving out of the downtown area in the late 1800s, and by people, I mean rich white dudes who built beautiful craftsmen houses and awesomely creepy mansions, most of which are still standing. It had the right vibe for shooting horror.
With Joe the pro. Courtesy Scott Ian.
I headed down the block to the house where they were shooting the scene and met with Greg. He explained the scene: “You’ll be walking down the street toward the house. Hannah”—the woman that would become the Bicycle Girl zombie—“and her two kids are going to come running out and run right past you. You’ll turn and follow them.”
I could do that. We did three or four takes, and then Greg had me do a few more turns because he wanted to get a good close-up shot of my face. I could’ve shot the scene all day long. I would’ve done anything—bite someone, get torn in half, or rip someone’s guts out and eat them. I was committed. Even the contact lenses weren’t bothering me anymore as long as they put drops in my eyes every fifteen minutes.
Already an old pro, I asked if I could keep the makeup on and hang out and watch the rest of the shoot. A camera team was filming me for my field report, so they were fine with being able to get more content of me on set. I watched Joe shoot his scene; he surprises Hannah, biting her arm after she gets in a car she is hoping to use to get herself and children to safety. Hannah shoots Joe in the head and runs out of the car.
It was so cool. I hoped that someday I’d get to do a scene where I got shot in the head—or worse.
I got worse.
I hung around another hour watching them shoot. During one shot Greg yelled, “More blood! I need more blood!” I loved having a job where people yelled things like that. I talked at the camera about my experience for the field report and was done. Garrett asked if I wanted to come back to the trailer to take the makeup off, and I asked if I could wear it home. I had the idea to have the camera crew follow me home and film me walking into my house, hanging out with my wife, Pearl, and holding my then two-month-old son, Revel, just another day in the life of a walker. Greg said if the makeup wasn’t bugging me, it was fine with him if I wore the makeup home. They gave me the stuff they use to dissolve all the glue and a couple of tubes of the makeup remover and told me to take a really hot shower to take it all off in there. I got some very strange looks at red lights on my way home. The crew filmed me holding my son, asking him if he wanted to eat guts for dinner. He didn’t even blink looking at me—no fear at all. That’s my boy! And we got a great picture of the three of us in front of the fireplace that we used as our Christmas card that year. Father of the year, right here.
Father of the year! Courtesy Scott Ian.
I was so excited to have been a part of The Walking Dead webisodes and could hardly wait for them to air in October before the season two premiere. I had already given up on the talk show thing, figuring they cut together the pilot and it was a no-go. I didn’t care: if getting made up and being in the webisodes was all I got to do, I was stoked with having been able to have that amazing experience.
We’re a happy family! Courtesy Scott Ian.
Then my agent called.
The Talking Dead was a go.
“Wow! Holy crap, that’s awesome! They liked what we did! Cool title as well!” I excitedly said to my agent. “I am fucking thrilled! My dream job is becoming a reality! I’m going to be on a TV show talking about zombies and get to be a part of that world on the inside!”
I was so excited that I wasn’t paying attention to my agent as she was trying to get my attention: “Scott, hold on, hold on, listen. There’s something I need to tell you…”
“Sorry, I’m just so excited about this. What is it?”
She got quiet for a few seconds and said, “The Talking Dead is a go, but not with you.”
“Huh? What? I don’t understand. What do you mean?” I nervously replied, my excitement running out of me faster than the Flash and a hot pit of anxiety growing in my belly.
“They’re just going with Chris as the host, no field reporter/zombie expert. They thought you were great—they’re just going a different way with the show. I’m so sorry,” she said, trying to let me down easy. I felt like I’d fallen off a cliff onto the sea-battered rocks below.
I mustered up a reply, “Umm, okay. No worries. Thanks for telling me,” and I hung up.
Fuck.
I was bummed, but I was already climbing out of the rocks. I still got to be in the webisodes, and the reality of being able to be on a weekly show was not reality. My schedule with Anthrax would never allow for that. I wasn’t thinking of that when I was fantasizing about getting paid to talk on television about zombies. And really, I wasn’t missing out on anything because who would watch a Walking Dead talk postshow?
NEW YORK, NY, OCTOBER 16, 2016—Days before the highly anticipated season seven premiere of The Walking Dead AMC announced that the series, the number-one show on television among adults eighteen to forty-nine for the last four years, had been renewed for an eighth season, premiering in late 2017 and kicking off with the one hundredth episode of the franchise. All sixteen episodes of The Walking Dead season eight will be followed by Talking Dead, the live after-show hosted by Chris Hardwick, which is the highest-rated talk show on television and number-two show on cable, behind The Walking Dead.
Who indeed.
Talking Dead became the highest-rated talk show on television. More people watch Talking Dead than almost all the latenight talk shows—Colbert, Kimmel, Fallon, Meyers, and so on—combined. Congratulations to my buddy Chris Hardwick, the king of talk shows! This shows you what I know about programming television. I’ll stick to watching it.
Okay, back to October 2011, Walking and Talking Dead were starting their takeover of the airwaves, I was on tour for our Worship Music album, and life moved on. Seven months later, out of the blue, I got an email from Chris Hardwick.
I don’t know why Chris was up at 6:25 a.m. thinking about me, but I sure am happy he was. I immediately replied, telling Chris I was definitely interested, and soon after that my show Blood & Guts (changed to Bloodworks after Nerdist stopped working with Fangoria and started working with Legendary to produce the show) was born. Instead of getting to talk about zombies on television, I was going to get to be made up every episode and get killed or maimed in some awesome way by the top effects guys. Chris and the folks at Nerdist introduced me to Jack Bennett, who they got to direct/produce the show, and we hit it off right away. We were nerdmates. Jack brought in a DP named Justin Cruse, another nerdmate, and we were hip deep in gore in no time.
Over the course of the show I’ve had my head chainsawed in half by Jerry Constantine. I got to bash a zombie’s head in with a pipe and run over a zombie’s head with a car at the KNB shop with Greg Nicotero. I got turned into a Jewish Jerry Garcia who, in an homage to Candid Camera, takes a guitar off the wall at a guitar shop on Sunset Boulevard, plugs it into an amp, and plays Anthrax and Slayer way too loud to the amazement of the customers and the dismay of the store management before I walk out with the guitar and get chased down the street. Jennifer Aspinall made all that happen. I got a knife through the face by Robert Hall. I was shot, blown up, and taught how to use a flame-thrower by Ron Trost. Decapitated by a gorilla? Yep, that was with Tom Woodruff Jr. and Alec Gillis. I had my face ripped off by Larry Bones and my fingers bitten off by a troll with Mike Elizalde. Vincent Van Dyke turned me into the devil who then grants my younge
r self’s wish to be “just like Angus” by impaling me on a Gibson SG guitar neck the same way Angus Young is on the cover of AC/DC’s If You Want Blood album. I was turned into a Deep One from Lovecraft’s The Shadow over Innsmouth and Jack the Ripper by the amazing Joel Harlow.
Had enough? Hell no.
I was disemboweled by that evil little fucker Chucky thanks to Tony Gardner. I got drunk in the afternoon with Dan Harmon (talking about his stop-motion animation company Starburns that made Anomalisa) and then got to see a stop-motion miniature of me murder the Easter Bunny. I spent two days with the legendary Rick Baker, who regaled me with amazing stories about his work (Eddie Murphy is one of those actors who loves to get made up) and showed me his incredible paintings. I went to the Game of Thrones set in Belfast and got turned into a fucking White Walker by their makeup wizard Barrie Gower. That’s a lot of blood and guts and not even close to all of it. Thank you, gentlemen, for making dying so much fun.
Earlier in this tale I said that becoming a zombie “takes a lot of hard work and disappointment, and ultimately it’s your love for the genre that will allow you to triumph and represent the undead.” It had been almost three years since the disappointment of not getting on the Talking Dead turned into the delight of making Bloodworks, which came out of my love for the genre, and all of that led up to me asking Greg Nicotero and the Nerdist producers going through proper channels and asking the network AMC if we could bring our little Bloodworks show down to Atlanta to do an episode with The Walking Dead. Greg had already invited me down to get made up and be a walker, but I wanted more than that—to do an episode of Bloodworks with a show as big as The Walking Dead, well, that would really put us on the map, getting to be a part of the biggest show on television. That was what I wanted. And on August 1, 2014, they said yes. I was going to be a walker in an episode on the fifth season of The Walking Dead. Jack and I were thrilled; this was a really big deal on so many levels. They were giving us access no other media gets, but we were under strict guidelines: we were not allowed to shoot; AMC had a camera crew to shoot, and then they would supply us the footage. No problem. We were not allowed to post any pictures from set or even talk about what we did until after the episode aired. No problem. We couldn’t air our episode until after the episode aired. No problem. There wouldn’t be a problem—we would’ve done anything they asked us to make this happen. This was “The Show.” Doing the webisodes was great, but this was the real deal. Like in baseball when a minor league player gets drafted up to the majors, he’s made it to “The Show.”
Greg needed my life cast sent to the KNB shop in Los Angeles so they could start working on my walker. I’d had my head cast twice for episodes of Bloodworks at this point. The first time I had it done they didn’t put enough Vaseline or whatever they use to keep the alginate from sticking to my chest hair, and when they pulled it off it was like the scene in the 40-Year-Old Virgin when Steve Carell gets his chest waxed. I cry a little just thinking about it.
This time around my walker was going to be sans beard. Scott Ian isn’t walking around in Atlanta, so they would need to make a chin appliance to glue over it. Other than that detail I didn’t want to know what they had planned for my walker; I wanted to see it all for the first time in the makeup chair on set. Everything was coming together; the only piece missing was when. It had to be an episode that Greg was directing—he was directing four episodes in season five—and it had to be on a date when I wasn’t on tour. With both of our schedules so fluid it took a lot of juggling and planets aligning to finally nail down October 6 as the shoot date. I couldn’t believe this was happening.
MONDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2014
THE WALKING DEAD EPISODE: 512 (airdate tbd 2015)
RUN OF SHOW:
5:15 a.m.—CALL TIME AT BASECAMP / AD TRAILER. Yes, bright and early, though it will still be dark out!
5:18 a.m.—WARDROBE. I will meet you at the AD trailer upon arrival to sign NDAs and escort you to Wardrobe.
5:48 a.m.—MAKEUP
7:18 a.m.—CAMERA READY
7:30 a.m.—REHEARSAL
8:00 a.m.—SHOOTING. You are in the first two scenes shooting this day.
1:00 p.m.—LUNCH. You may be wrapped by this time but are more than welcome to stay and join us for lunch.
EPK crew will arrive at 5 a.m. to be camera ready as previously discussed for wardrobe/hair/makeup process and b-roll of scenes. You will have access to basecamp b-roll immediately through AMC PR. Access to scene b-roll will be closer to airdate, as directed by AMC PR.
Getting that email of the schedule the week before the shoot was so cool that it made it real in my brain. I was really doing this.
I flew to Atlanta the night before the shoot and took a taxi to the hotel, where I met my manager, Mike, as well as Charlie from the band, who came down with his daughter Mia. They are all huge fans of the show as well, and the opportunity to come to the set was too good to pass up. I tried to get to bed early, as I had a 5:15 a.m. call time, but I was too excited to sleep. I barely got two hours and then was on my way to Senoia where The Walking Dead sets are. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t slept; I had so much adrenaline running through me that I was fully amped.
I got to the set right on time. It was still dark and was cold, in the low thirties. Security directed me over to where the dressing room trailers were. The set was very quiet; no one was around to ask what to do. Craft services (catering) were already set up, so I grabbed the largest coffee I could find and waited for someone to come and open up the dressing room trailer. I was with Mike, Charlie, and Mia, all of us standing outside in the dark, freezing and laughing about how glamorous big-time TV is. After about ten minutes of that, someone from the production came by and said, “You guys must be freezing! I’ll open your dressing room—there’s heat in there.” I wasn’t bothered—I would’ve stood out in the cold all day to get to be a walker. But we all crowded into my little room to get warm, and I figured the whole day was going to be a lot of hurry up and wait.
Wrong.
There was a knock on the dressing room door, and someone from the costume department brought my bespoke walker wear in for me to try on (I had sent my sizes weeks before). Looking filthy in my zombie best, I was whisked over to the makeup trailer to be transformed.
I met Kevin Wasner from KNB EFX, and we got right into it. I asked him what he had planned for me, and he pointed to a model of my head with the pieces they had made for my walker face. It was a full head application, or what they call “hero makeup” because there was going to be close-up shots of my face. The details were incredible, the open wounds on my head were beautiful, and the way they had my spine showing through on the back of my neck was so cool. Look at the pictures, as my words don’t do justice to the artistry involved. The makeup took four hours, which for me flew by. I am fascinated with the process of transformation by makeup effects, as a fan and as a subject, and I find the experience to be deeply satisfying. It’s like getting to wear the ultimate Halloween costume.
I emerged from the makeup trailer into the now-warm and sunny morning a new man, brutally handsome in an undead sort of way. I was taken straight over to the costume department, where they added the finishing touches to my clothes, airbrushing the dried blood in all the appropriate places, and giving my look an overall aged feel. The attention to detail is really incredible, with the different departments in synergy to create the best the genre has ever seen.
And then I was ready for contacts. As you know from my experience on the webisodes, I’m never thrilled about having contacts put in, but in this scenario I was a pro-lens guy. They popped those suckers right in, and there was no grief from me. I was ready for my close-up, Mr. Nicotero.
A real big-league Walker. I made it to the show! Courtesy Scott Ian.
It was a short drive over from base camp to where they were shooting. I headed right over to the set, where they were rehearsing the fight choreography of the scene with Andrew Lincoln and Chandler Riggs. I
immediately noticed that Andrew had shaved the beard he had in the previous season. A detail like this would be big news in the Walking Dead fan world. Being the nerd I am about the show, I was stoked to have this inside info before anyone else, and of course I was speculating about why he shaved. Nerd! Another cool detail I noticed was every time they’d rehearse the fight, at the end of the scene Andrew and Chandler would help the actors playing the walkers get up off the ground and ask if they were okay. I noticed this all over the set that day. The walkers were very well taken care of. I thought that was really cool. Andrew later told me that they’re always nice to the walkers, that they are all just working together to make a great show and the people playing the walkers work really hard in tough conditions under all that makeup.
Greg came over to me, gave me a hug, and looked me over, his keen eye taking in every detail of my makeup and costume. He thought I looked great, but they’d just do some touch-ups right before we shot so the makeup looked fresh on camera. Greg introduced me to Andrew and Chandler, and we shook hands and said hello—they were both very cool. Greg went right back to work laying out the scene again: Andrew and Chandler would be fighting the four walkers that came out of the woods, and they will kill three of them quickly and then Andrew, struggling with the last walker, gets backed up to where I was underneath the pile of garbage, and then I reach out and grab his boot. Andrew pulls away from me, and then I crawl my upper half out of the garbage, reaching for them, but I can’t crawl all the way out because my legs are stuck. I keep reaching for them, and Andrew, just about to kill me, defers to Chandler when Chandler asks for the metal pole and Chandler puts the pole through my head. Greg asked if we were all good with the scene, and we were, so he had us all get into our positions.
