A lot of the third act of Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead involves Dave Bautista playing off and interacting with Tig Notaro’s Marianne Peters, so it’s bizarre to think that the two actors have never met each other before, despite being involved in so many of the same scenes across Netflix’s zombie blockbuster.
Notaro admitted that the situation was highly unusual given that Bautista’s character visits his old friend Peters when he’s rounding up his crack team of thieves and mercenaries, so there’s clearly a lot of in-universe history between the pair, while it really bothers the leading man that he doesn’t actually know the actress at all, because he was so impressed with her performance.
Snyder revealed that it cost millions of dollars to composite the comedian into the movie close to a year after shooting wrapped when original star Chris D’Elia was dropped due to sexual misconduct allegations, forcing Notaro to film her scenes against a green screen in the middle of a global pandemic, matters that weren’t helped by her immunocompromised status as a cancer survivor.
However, it turns out that a solitary member of Army of the Dead‘s ensemble managed to work with the actress, after Ana de la Reguera confirmed that she took part in the reshoots to ensure that the eyelines matched between her Maria Cruz and Peters, given that D’Elia was much taller than his subsequent replacement.
“The scene where I drop off the gas canisters on the roof. I shot that originally with Chris so we had to reshoot that. And the scene where the heist is being explained by the team in a warehouse, originally Chris was standing next to me, and he’s so tall, and Tig might be shorter than me, so I had to be there for her shooting that scene just to get the eye lines right.”
At least Notaro wasn’t completely alone after boarding the ensemble, but it’s still odd to think that such a popular film like Army of the Dead with so many moving parts and explosive action sequences managed to replace one actor with another in post-production, and there are probably a lot of Netflix subscribers that didn’t even notice.