You can thank a heavy dose of movie magic for why Tig Notaro will be appearing in Zack Snyder’s zombie heist flick Army of the Dead, which hits Netflix this Friday. The comedian and One Mississippi star stopped by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Tuesday to explain how she was plugged into the film after it wrapped, replacing disgraced comedian Chris D’Elia—whose performance was snipped out of the movie after he was accused of sexually harassing and grooming underage girls. (D’Elia denies all allegations.)
Notaro got to see the entire film before deciding whether to appear in the movie, and shot all of her scenes against a green screen. “I’ve never met Dave Bautista in my life,” Notaro told Colbert of her Army of the Dead co-star, even though they share scenes in the finished film. She recounted shooting a scene in which her co-star Ana de la Reguera walked with Notaro “from a stairwell to halfway to my helicopter,” and said her assistant would throw on a green suit and stand in for Bautista. That, however, was the extent of her contact with other humans while shooting her scenes.
“It was such a technical shoot,” Notaro told Colbert, “that they would just say ‘Look in this direction. Walk exactly on this line.’” Snyder would then ask her to repeat the same thing “a centimeter to the left” in order to match her movements more closely to D’Elia’s.
While Notaro said she had fun on the unconventional shoot, she’d prefer to make a film the old-fashioned way. “I never want to do it again,” she told Colbert. “I want to be in an actual movie with people.” Then again, Notaro has been trending on social media for being “a badass and hot” from her appearance in the trailer alone—so maybe acting with scene partners is overrated.
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