Army of the Dead: Zack Snyder Explains Why He Didn’t Cut His Unintentional Cameo

Netflix’s Army of the Dead was helmed by Zack Snyder and features a fun line-up of actors, including Dave Bautista. Turns out, if you look hard enough, you can also spot a pretty big cameo in the beginning: Snyder himself! While chatting with Entertainment Tonight, Snyder was asked about accidentally being caught by the cameras in the movie’s opening sequence and the director shared why he decided to keep the happy accident.

“Yeah, if you look, there’s a mirror that the QC, you know we do this quality check, we watch the movie hundreds of times to look for like some weird little mistakes and stuff. I got a call and they’re like, ‘Oh, we found you in this one shot,’ and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s right,’ because I remembered it. They were like, ‘Do you want us to erase it?’ And I was like, ‘Oh no, leave it, it’s fine.’ You know, it’s like, nobody will notice it, so…”

The interviewer said she tried to look for Snyder’s cameo, but couldn’t find it, so it’s definitely a “Where’s Waldo” type deal. Of course, we knew someone on Twitter would have spotted it, and sure enough, we found some tweets with the screenshot. You can check one out below:

One of the coolest things about Army of the Dead was the late addition of comedian Tig Notaro. Snyder had already filmed the movie with Chris D’Elia but decided to cut him from the film after he was accused of sexually harassing underage girls. Snyder ended up going back and replacing him with Notaro, which he previously told UPROXX was an “awesome exercise.”

“Maybe I’ll get some kind of technical award as a DP for putting her in that movie because that part was hard,” Snyder, who served as his own Director of Photography, shared. “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.” He added, “I was shocked that she said yes, frankly. So that was the goodness for me, that she wanted to do it.”

Army of the Dead is now playing in select theatres and is available to stream on Netflix.