Army of the Dead: Zack Snyder Says Adding Tig Notaro was Awesome Exercise

Production on Zack Snyder's upcoming Army of the Dead mostly took place in the summer of 2019 and [...]

Production on Zack Snyder's upcoming Army of the Dead mostly took place in the summer of 2019 and among the ensemble cast was stand-up comedian Chris D'Elia. Ahead of the movie's release however came major accusations against D'Elia who was accused of sexually harassing underage girls. With time to spare before the release, Snyder and Netflix elected to remove D'Elia from the film entirely and replace him with another comedian, Tig Notaro. Speaking in a new interview, Snyder said that that once he became aware of the allegations against D'Elia that he moved to make the change in the film, saying pulling it off was tricky.

"Maybe I'll get some kind of technical award as a DP for putting her in that movie, because that part was hard," Snyder told UPROXX (Snyder served as his own Director of Photography for the movie). "It was funny because I shot the movie in a really super organic way, and I was like, oh, this is going to be cool, available light, and it's going to be minimal and all this. And then cut to me on the stage, I have to recreate that in the most sterile circumstance possible with the most lights and the most everything. And so it was interesting. You have to really understand where the light is all the time to make it match, and you light the green screens correctly, it's really problematic, but it was good. It was fun. It was an awesome exercise. And Tig is awesome.

Snyder added, "I was shocked that she said yes, frankly. So that was the goodness for me, that she wanted to do it."

Deborah Snyder, Zack's wife and producer on his films, also opened up about the process behind getting Notaro into the movie calling it "daunting" in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

"We shot for 14 days to get Tig in the movie," Deborah Snyder said. "Had it not been the pandemic, we probably would have brought the whole cast in and reshot scenes with everybody....The weird thing is, she got to see the movie. How often do you get to decide you want to be a part of something and it's already made? The big joke was, it was only her for 14 days. She was like, 'I felt like I was the star of the movie and then I realized I was out of focus in a lot of the scenes.'"

Now playing in select theaters, Army of the Dead will be released on Netflix on May 21st.

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