killers who are basically mirror images of
Columbus and Woody Harrelson’s Tallahassee.
“It stretches believability a little bit,” admits
Reese, “particularly the resemblance between
Thomas Middleditch [Albuquerque] and Jesse
Eisenberg. We did approach Michael Cera fi rst
because he and Jesse are often confused for the
same person.” Luke Wilson plays Tallahassee’s
‘twin’, Flagstaff, but that role was originally
earmarked for someone Reese and Wernick
have worked with before. “He [Ryan Reynolds]
read the script and loved it,” says Wernick. “But
he was off shooting Free Guy. We were bummed
out to not have him, but Luke was amazing.”
KILLING THE ZOMBIE KILLERS
If you were expecting these new special guest
stars to stick around, bond and bicker with
Eisenberg, Harrelson and Emma Stone, you
thought wrong. In the fi lm’s standout sequence,
Albuquerque and Flagstaff are bitten, try to cover
up their bites, and then transform into drooling
mega-zombies before being dispatched. “It was
a little bit of the Bill Murray pattern,” says Wernick,
referring to Murray’s legendary cameo in the fi rst
movie, which ended with him biting the bullet. “We
wanted to inject a little bit of fun and new characters
into the world, then kill them off. This was a fun
pit stop on the way. It worked for us last time!”GORE BY GORE
It’s hard to top squashing zombies with one of the
world’s major landmarks, but Reese and Wernick
still come up with an unorthodox ghoul-killing
machine for the fi lm’s fi nale: a giant monster truck
which Dawson drives with an abandon that would
win the approval of Clarkson and Hammond (but
perhaps not May). “I think in our fi rst version it was
construction vehicles,” recalls Reese. “Zombieland
is basically wish fulfi lment,” adds Wernick. “So
we thought, ‘What cars would we drive?’ We all
pushed around our Tonka trucks as little kids.
What better way to spend life with zombies than
behind four wheels of absolute awesomeness?”MURRAY MINT
You could make the argument that Murray’s droll
appearance as himself in Zombieland is one ofthe greatest cameos of all time. Maybe even the
greatest. But it gave the Double Tap creative team
something of a headache: how do you top it? Do
you even bother? “Our feeling is that there is no
Zombieland without Bill Murray,” says Wernick.
“When we approached the second one, we
thought, ‘Is he a zombie now?’” Instead, they
decided to end the movie with a sequence in
which we see Murray at a ‘Garfi eld 3’ junket on
the day of the zombie outbreak, killing various
fi lm journalists (Empire is not included; hopefully
we make it) as they try to snack on him. “At one
point that was in the middle of the movie, but it
felt better at the end. And Bill was a much easier
get the second time. We weren’t hanging by the
thread at the last minute waiting for him to show
up!” Truth be told, it doesn’t hit the heights of the
fi rst movie’s cameo, but if you’ve ever wanted to
see Bill Murray beating seven shades of shit out
of entertainment journalists, this is the scene for
you. CHRIS HEWITTZOMBIELAND: DOUBLE TAP IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY
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