13 Behind-The-Scenes Secrets You Probably Never Knew About Shaun Of The Dead

It’s been 20 years since Shaun Of The Dead arrived on screens and kick-started Edgar Wright’s iconic Cornetto Trilogy (later accomplished by Hot Fuzz and The World’s End).

The endlessly quotable, quintessentially British and laugh-out-loud zom-rom-com is an undisputed traditional that also holds up twenty years later.

It’s additionally the film through which the world acquired to know the loveable comedic duo Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, who star within the zombie apocalypse comedy as a directionless salesman and his lazy roommate, who should beat back an invasion by any means essential.

If you’re already planning your newest re-watch, listed here are the behind-the-scenes secrets and techniques you in all probability didn’t know…

The complete idea of the Shaun Of The Dead was impressed by an episode of Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright’s sitcom Spaced. In the episode titled Art, Simon’s character stays up all evening enjoying the online game Resident Evil, when he begins to hallucinate a zombie invasion.

“I wrote an episode of Spaced where my character fights zombies in his flat. We had such a fun time shooting it, we thought we ought to make a zombie movie – like it was that easy,” Simon Pegg informed The Guardian in 2020. “We really were so naive. We thought we could do anything.”

It’s exhausting to think about now once we look again on the cult success of the movie, however Shaun Of The Dead was by no means assured to be a important or business success.

“I didn’t know if anyone was going to see this film apart from my mum,” Simon Pegg informed GQ in a current retrospective.

Edgar Wright agreed: “I don’t think we had any thought of what it would be beyond the UK. And even that was like, please let it go down well in the UK… everything that came afterwards, travelling around the world with it, was a life-changing bonus.”

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Simon Pegg mentioned the success of the movie was a “vindication of our intentions” to make the movie “very, very British”.

“We didn’t make any concessions to sort of transatlantic-ism,” he added.

We in fact now know Nick Frost and Simon Pegg as an inseparable comedic duo, however apparently trade people have been confused as to why director Edgar wasn’t vying for greater names.

“There were some times people… didn’t understand necessarily why Simon and Nick together was so important,” Edgar informed GQ. “There were a couple of times [where they said], ‘Ed is like the funniest part of the film. Why wouldn’t you go with somebody bigger?’.”

He added: “It was literally that thing of, like, ‘Could you get an American in this part? Could Jack Black play this part?’. And we were like, ‘No, it has to be Nick’.”

Speaking throughout a current oral historical past with IndieWire, Edgar recalled how they have been requested to take a look at “casting up” to get some extra excessive calibre names concerned for the roles of Shaun’s girlfriend Liz and mom Barbara, which have been written particularly for Kate Ashfield and Penelope Wilton.

“We met Kate Winslet about playing Liz and she liked it, but ultimately didn’t do it,” Edgar recalled.

Two-time Oscar nominee and (on the time) future winner Helen Mirren was additionally thought of for the function of Barbara.

In an excerpt from the e book You’ve Got Red On You – concerning the making of Shaun Of The Dead – printed in Rolling Stone, Edgar recalled the performing icon’s “brilliant” response.

“She read the script and said, ‘I’m passing on the role of Barbara. I would only do the movie if I got to play Ed.’ Her reason was, ‘Well, Ed’s the funniest part.’”

As we all know, it was Nick who went on to painting Ed, however we will’t assist however admire The Queen actor’s resolve.

Speaking to GQ, Edgar reeled off the names of individuals within the trade who supported the movie with press quotes: Quentin Tarantino, Stephen King, Sam Raimi, Guillermo Del Toro, Robert Rodriguez and Frank Darabont being amongst them.

To say thanks, they even made every of them personalised variations of Shaun’s badge with their very own names on it.

Shaun Of The Dead was clearly an homage to the zombie style, a lot in order that it impressed Night Of The Living Dead director George A. Romero.

In a 2008 interview with CinemaBlend, the director recalled: “So I get this message from these guys, and I didn’t know who they were. Some cat named Edgar Wright: ‘I made this movie, I hope you like it.’

“So next thing I know, some cat from Universal shows up like a guy with a bomb suitcase, the fucking print is chained to him. He starts saying, ‘We want to show you this movie at the local theatre. We arranged it.’ I see this movie a little too dark, but it was hilarious, man! And I flipped for it.”

One of essentially the most memorable scenes from the movie sees Shaun and Ed toss (very rigorously chosen) vinyl information at two approaching zombies. It seems they couldn’t simply launch any previous album, they really needed to get permission from the artists.

Edgar recalled Smooth Operator singer Sade Adu being notably beneficiant together with her log off for Diamond Life being one of many chosen albums. “It’s a tough thing to get someone on board [by] saying, ‘We want to trash your album!’” Edgar mentioned in a quote from You’ve Got Red On You.

“Sade, who I’ve never met, signed her release and was down for it. To me, she’s the coolest person ever. It’s like, you don’t know us from Adam, we actually break your record in the shot, and you let us clear your likeness. That’s amazing.”

The scene additionally depicts the pair deciding which Prince albums they need to use as weapons, however it was almost David Bowie on the centre of these deliberations.

“The only other bit that we wrote, as far as I recall, is at one point we did David Bowie albums,” Edgar informed GQ. “I think it was like: “Hunky Dory, no. Ziggy Stardust, no. The Labyrinth soundtrack…”

“I think we reached out to David Bowie’s publicist, and I heard something secondhand that he was touchy about Labyrinth, so that was a no.”

Don’t Stop Me Now by Queen isn’t the obvious option to soundtrack a violent zombie assault, however director Edgar was an enormous fan of the enduring band. Thankfully, they have been capable of get the sign-off for this one.

“We choreographed the entire fight to that song, which was a real worry because it hadn’t been cleared for use and could have ended up being way too expensive,” Simon informed The Guardian. “So we wrote a begging letter to Queen guitarist Brian May and he was lovely about it.”

Edgar recalled to IndieWire how there was a “group of disgruntled teenagers who were throwing stones at the camera because we were on their turf”.

He went on: “In an attempt to make peace with the teenagers, we promised that they could be in the film. A couple of days later, they went through makeup, dressed up as zombies and they’re in the film — you can see them when Shaun is next to the garden fence!”

When Nick’s character wants a Cornetto to assist him nurse a hangover, this was really borrowed from director Edgar’s actual life.

“The appearance of the Cornetto ice cream in Shaun Of The Dead is because it was a hangover cure for me in college and because it seemed like a funny thing for Nick Frost’s character to want on a Sunday morning,” Edgar shared in a chunk with Focus Features.

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