Greg Nicotero Talks With EW About The Well Zombie

The EW got a chance to sit down with Make-Up Artist and Executive Producer Greg Nicotero about his work on that zombie that fell in the well. It’s not your regular interview though because it seems like EW gave Nicotero free reign to talk and it almost seems like it’s a blog post or something.

Right when they opened the writers’ room at the start of season 2, they said, “We want to do a field trip.” And I said, “Yeah! You should bring all the guys to KNB. They can walk around the shop, see what we’re building, what we’ve built, maybe get a little inspiration.” We had a whole bunch of stuff on display from other films that we had done. We had a mask that we made for Grindhouse of this infected guy, all bloated and distressed and disgusting.

I got a phone call two hours after they had left the shop. They said, “We want to do this idea: A walker fell into a well.” The well was filled with nine feet of water, and the walker would just start absorbing and absorbing all of the liquid in there, so that it would get completely bloated and discolored.

We had done some fake drowned bodies for movies in the past. One of the things we’ve noticed — looking at some morgue research and cadaver research — is that everything gets really swollen. The liquid saturates the skin so much that it swells up, and the skin starts to split. That was one of the things that we really wanted to play up.

We took a full-body cast and head-cast, and we sculpted the whole body from scratch. We put on a really thin skin, then backed it with silicone, then had a foam suit on the inside. In between the silicone and the foam suit, we put in balloons filled with water. So the actual liquid — the movement of the suit — would transfer as the performer moved side-to-side. If we made it out of foam latex, it would’ve been stiff. But we used silicone that was heavily plasticized — which means that the silicone was really soft. The suit probably weighed 60 pounds.

To read the entire interview click here!

-Dane
Gotham Knights Online: Your One Stop Shop For Everything Batman!

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