Following Chris D'Elia's sexual assault accusations in March 2020, director Zack Snyder made the decision to replace him with Tig Notaro in Army of the Dead. But the catch is that Snyder made the call months after the Netflix movie wrapped production, which, like everything else, happened to be in the middle of the global coronavirus pandemic. That meant Notaro had to film her scenes by herself — here's a look at how Army of the Dead pulled that off.
The film takes place after a zombie outbreak occurs and is contained in Las Vegas. A group of mercenaries hired by billionaire Bly Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada) takes advantage of the city's vulnerable state in order to pull off a massive heist. Ex-soldier Scott Ward (Dave Bautista) is tasked with putting a team together for the job. Among those he taps for the job is helicopter pilot Marianne Peters, played by Notaro, who he hires to get his group out of Las Vegas before the U.S. military destroys the city with a nuclear bomb.
While Peters is by no means the main character in Army of the Dead, she is featured a fair amount, and flat-out steals a number of the scenes with her outrageously flippant demeanor and deadpan delivery of lines. Further, Peters interacts often with the other characters, even though, again, Notaro filmed her scenes entirely solo. It wasn't easy, but Snyder pulled this off with a fairly unusual tactic that ended paying off nicely. Here's how they did it.
As IndieWire reported, Snyder referred to the process of shooting Notaro's scenes as an incredibly technical experiment. Army of the Dead isn't the first movie to replace an actor after production wrapped — just look at how All the Money in the World replaced Kevin Spacey with Christopher Plummer. But in that case, the cast returned for reshoots. As this wasn't possible for Army of the Dead, Snyder stuck Notaro in front of a green screen completely on her own to shoot her scenes. But given how difficult it would be for her to mimic D'Elia's movements and the height differences between the actors — Notaro is 5'5" and D'Elia is 6'2" — it wasn't possible to just paste her footage over D'Elia's.
Instead, Army of the Dead's Marcus Taormina visual effects supervisor completely removed D'Elia from scenes in the movie. Snyder would then reshoot those scenes with Notaro, giving her the freedom to move around naturally. His team went as far as to replicate the physical spaces and camera angles of the original scenes, using various items such as greened-out props to indicate where Notaro should be looking during her scenes. Finally, her dialogue had to perfectly sync with the characters' pre-existing reactions, meaning there was to be no ad-libbing from the comedian.
The final result in Army of the Dead is pretty impressive. Without prior knowledge that Notaro was edited into the film after the fact, a viewer would never realize that's what happened. The only semblance of a giveaway is the fact that Notaro's scenes feel a little one-sided, but even that is subtle seeing as how it makes sense with her storyline in the movie. For the most part, it's like Notaro was a part of the cast all along. It's quite a feat that's a potential look into the future of movies. With the technology and strategies that Snyder and his team used, anyone can be inserted into a movie. Army of the Dead proves that the possibilities for movie production are endless.