Are you a fan of Syfy and The Asylum's Z Nation? We caught up with DJ Qualls during a recent press conference, where he talked about his role on the show as Citizen Z. Continue reading to find out why he thinks zombies are popular now, his experience working alone for the first episodes, and we get a tease of we can expect from his character over the course of the season:
On why he thinks zombies are popular now:
"You know what's interesting... if you go to any major city, drugs, like problems with drugs are out of control. There's a lot of homeless, druggie people that kind of resemble zombies. And I was walking around downtown Spokane where we shoot and I had this really weird experience just looking at things like as an outsider. It's sort of a reflection maybe of what's happening in current culture."
About his scene with a zombie dog and a regular dog:
"It's interesting about this show for me. I don't work with any of the other actors. I only recently met them all at the premiere of the show. So, I am talking to myself or two a blank computer screen most of the time. The dog scene was interesting because we have budgetary constraints on our show. So, we're not getting a dog who has played in a movie where he dunks a basketball or any of those kinds of dogs. These dogs don't really want to be there. The dog that we used, his name is Wizard, got a big movie or TV show after we shot the first three episodes. He came back and now he hates us. The catering on that other show must be amazing."
On playing a character isolated from other actors:
"That's one of the fun things about the show for me. I don't get to play with other actors, but I get to play the isolation. And he does start to crack after a while. He develops like multiple personalities that he uses to do different things on the air during broadcasts. Yeah, you definitely see the effects."
Improvising versus sticking to what's on the script: "It's a mix of both. Because I have so much dialogue to memorize by myself, I mean, a lot of times, on an average shooting day on a TV show is about 11, 12 pages and that's split between multiple actors. I shoot about 30 pages a day by myself because I block shoot.
I'll do maybe an episode in a day, so I'm shooting a lot of dialogue. It would be impossible for me to memorize it word-for-word. My brain sort of blanks about 14 pages into it., so they've given me some license to really make it my own and find different voices to say things in and different cadences of speech and different accents. So, yeah, it's a good mixture the writers and myself just sort of coming up with stuff."
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Here's a tease of tonight's episode of Z Nation:
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