Give him an empty eyeball socket and he’ll swoon. A macerated muscle or brittle bone? They’re cause for delight. No doubt about it, Greg Nicotero loves talkin’ ’bout degeneration.
The Walking Dead’s executive producer, special effects makeup designer and sometime director is ever surrounded by zombies and exposed innards, and he couldn’t be happier. In fact, as he recalls directing the Season 6 premiere, debuting Sunday on AMC, he bubbles with ghoulish delight.
“We shot more zombies than we ever had in any episode. I believe it was almost a thousand people in makeup, with 12 makeup artists, in a nine-day episode,” says the 52-year-old Pittsburgh native.
“There were times when the makeup artists never even left the trailer. They’d start at four in the morning, do makeup all day, and right when they’d finish their last person some of the first people they’d made up were coming into the trailer for cleanup.”
Greg Nicotero on the set of The Walking Dead [AMC]
The fact that the show is about to air its 68th episode is the ultimate validation for Nicotero, an apocalyptic apostle whose first major job was on George A. Romero’s 1985 zombie flick Day of the Dead, working alongside makeup vet Tom Savini.
In 1988, Nicotero formed the special effects studio KNB EFX Group, along with Robert Kurtzman and Howard Berger. The company has since worked on more than 400 film and TV projects, with Nicotero’s name linked to films like Evil Dead II, Scream, Predator, Grindhouse and Transformers.
The folks at AMC soon came knocking, and The Walking Dead premiered on Halloween Day 2010. More than five million viewers tuned in, making it the most-watched series premiere in the cable network’s history.
“Night of the Living Dead and the original Dawn of the Dead are among my favourite movies, so having the opportunity to be involved with the design and conceptualization of my own look for zombies was exciting,” says Nicotero, who collaborated with Frank Darabont on the look.
A zombie in The Walking Dead [AMC]
With prosthetics shuttled between KNB EFX in Los Angeles and The Walking Dead’s Atlanta set during filming, Nicotero and his team are always thinking of new ways to shred a swath of skin or tear off a tendon or two.
“I would never want the zombies to feel like they looked in Season 1, because in Season 1 we were six weeks into the fall of society and now we’re about two years in. It’s like a rotting pumpkin. You can put a pumpkin outside and two months later it’s just a puddle of goo,” he says.
“We go through probably 30 gallons of fake blood an episode, so after six years, we’ve probably gone through 10 to 15 thousand gallons of fake blood. And in Season 6, we’ve surpassed the sheer volume of zombie makeup we’ve done in the last three years combined.”
Greg Nicotero, right, works on a zombie on the set of The Walking Dead [AMC]
“We have our main makeup trailer and then the back trailer where we store all the prosthetics. Then when the person sits in your chair, you look at their features. It’s almost like a food competition show, where you get to run into the pantry, pick out all your ingredients and then come back to the trailer and put all those ingredients together,” says Nicotero.
“You can be creative. You can do makeup where this guy’s ear has been ripped off, and this guy has no jaw, or their teeth are all broken out. Or an eye’s missing. You get a chance to put your own flair on each makeup every single day.”
No guts, no glory, indeed.
The Walking Dead’s Season 6 premiere airs Sunday, Oct. 11, at 9 p.m. ET/PT on AMC
