It started off as a goof, my friends and I fulfilling a stupid dream we had long talked about, but somehow it turned into a job! Since the beginning, my friends and I have been fans of the show the Walking Dead.
I know it has ups and downs, but we always watched it together, and talked about driving out to where they shot it to be zombies.
The show uses fans as background zombies, and they don’t pay you but that doesn’t matter we just wanted to do it! The day comes, we are in the make up tent being zombified, and the portable AC unit they had went out. This is in the south, mind you, so the only thing higher than the humidity was the temperature, and with no cooling the show could not go on. The extras were sweating too much for the makeup to adhere properly, so without an emergency repair of the air conditioner, they would have to stop filming for the day. I couldn’t let that happen, and since I am a certified HVAC tech, I was able to offer my services on the spot. I made the head makeup FX person promise me that if I got the cooling working again, they would hook me up with the grossest zombie makeup of the day. So if you are watching the show and see a dead guy with half of his face completely ripped off, know that was me, and I earned it by fixing the air conditioner for the makeup FX department.