In the event of a zombie apocalypse, Tom Everett Scott has a plan: “Most zombies you can outrun — you’ve just got to keep their mouth away from you. Maybe buy a couple hockey masks.”
Alas, the characters in Scott’s new drama Z Nation don’t have hockey masks. Instead, those fleeing the ungrateful undead have spunk. More important, they have guns. They’re bringing the only known survivor of a zombie virus across the U.S., hoping to reach a lab that can use him to create a vaccine.
Zombies pursue; killing ensues. It’s all par for the corpse.
“You can get away with killing a zombie — no one’s going to get upset with you. There aren’t any zombie preservation societies,” reasons Scott, who’s known for brandishing nothing more deadly than sunglasses and drumsticks in the ’60s nostalgia film That Thing You Do!
The 43-year-old admits that while he appreciates a good zombie tale — he enjoyed 28 Days Later and both Dawn of the Dead movies — he hasn’t yet seen the biggest TV show in the genre: The Walking Dead, to which Z Nation will inevitably be compared.
Michael Welch, left, Tom Everett Scott, and Anastasia Baranova in Z Nation.
“Well, the same rule applies — you’ve got to kill a zombie in the head,” he says. “I don’t watch The Walking Dead, so I don’t know how we’re different. But I can tell you that our show is going to have really great characters and it’s a really well-written zombie thing that’s also fun.”
After all, Z Nation hails from The Asylum, the studio responsible for the fin-and-dandy disaster flick Sharknado. But this time, Asylum isn’t playing casualties for laughs. Z Nation is created, written and executive-produced by Karl Schaefer, of the otherworldly TV dramas Eureka and Dead Zone.
Schaefer proved indispensable for Scott when it came to getting inside his character’s head, so to speak.
“I had some questions going into it, just to give me some guidance. And one of the things that Karl told me was that my character (Charles Garnett) is the one character with hope. He’s actually got hope that this could work in the middle of this really sad, scary time for humans.”
Zombies run amuck in Z Nation
Off-screen, though, the humans playing Z Nation’s zombies revelled in morbid mirth. “There were, I think, hundreds of zombies. At the open auditions, so many people came out,” Scott says, laughing. “They were very enthusiastic, which is good because we made them do all kinds of horrible things.”
There was a time not too long ago when Scott was auditioning to be the It Ghoul. After getting his TV start in an episode of Law & Order and appearing on the comedy Grace Under Fire, Scott starred as the titular carnivorous canine in the 1997 film An American Werewolf in Paris. His TV credits since then include roles on Southland and ER.
“I don’t really pick my projects based on genre. I just normally go by character and story and who’s going to be working on the project,” he says, pausing. “American Werewolf was 18 years ago, so maybe every 18 years I’ll do a different horror genre.”
Z Nation debuts Sept. 12 on Space
