Chris D’Elia was meant to be in Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead before serious allegations booted him out of the project. The thing is? The movie had already finished filming – meaning D’Elia’s parts had already wrapped up. But, just like Christopher Plummer was able to replace Kevin Spacey in All the Money in the World post-filming, Tig Notaro came in to save the day.
Notaro recently opened up about getting the call from Snyder to play Peters instead of D’Elia:
“I was so baffled. I felt like there was some sort of misunderstanding… It didn’t seem possible for me to take on what Chris did. We’re such different actors and comedians. I honestly thought, regardless of what’s going on in his personal life, that his performance was excellent. But Zack said, ‘We want you to do exactly what you do.’ And, in turn, that’s all I did.”
On top of Notaro needing to play this character differently that D’Elia already had, Snyder also details the technical challenges in replacing a character who already was in certain scenes:
“I had to do this incredibly technical experiment, re-creating every scene, shot for shot. My visual-effects supervisor, Marcus Taormina, did the work of taking Chris completely out of the movie so Tig could have freedom [to move] within the scenes.”
Notaro also detailed filming the scenes, which involved a lot of green-screen and other challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic:
“‘They’d line up a piece of tape on the ground and say, okay, you’ve fallen in line with a group of people. You’re walking into a building.’ I’d be like, ‘Is it kind of a mosey? Okay, I’ll mosey.’ Then Zack might say, ‘That’s a little too fast with the moseying,’ and we’d start over again… [In the film’s climax, where a zombie is attacking Notaro’s scene partner,] That’s where I’m like, ‘I am not a trained actor’.
I had to be yelling lines, I have a zombie in the back of my helicopter, I have to press the right buttons and flick the right switches. You’re sitting there with all these adults standing ten feet away while you’re alone, acting like you’re crashing. I thought, Oh my God, I feel like an idiot. Can we be done with this?”
What do you think about Notaro replacing D’Elia?
Source: Movieweb
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