Nerd of the Living Dead

Dead men tell no tales - so AMC's letting Chris Hardwick do the talking.

Got questions about AMC's The Walking Dead? Of course you do. But now there's no need to merely shamble around the wastelands of Internet message boards in search of someone with the brainnnnsssss to answer. Instead, starting October 16th, you'll be able to fire off your burning zombie queries, like so many shotgun shells, to Talking Dead, the new post-episode discussion show hosted by our friend Chris Hardwick. But until then, we have our own questions for Chris about his show.

GeekChicDaily: Simon Pegg wrote an article about why fast zombies don't work. Any thoughts?

Chris Hardwick: Personally, I don't understand the concept of fast zombies as much. Fast zombies almost seem too supernatural in a magical way. A dead body, a corpse, that has been reanimated through some sort of a virus or a chemical testing or what have you, or a comet or whatever it is: those muscles – there's rigor mortis, there is going to be atrophy; there's a lot of things that are going to make it difficult for the zombie to have mobility, right? So I don't know physiologically how a fast zombie works.  I guess I can understand if someone JUST died. Maybe that's the distinction, if you're talking about a zombie who's been dead for a little while then they reanimate, okay, great. If it's sort of Thriller style and they’re pulling themselves out of the ground? Slow zombies.

Let's say Olympic athlete Jesse Owens gets bitten by a zombie, he's going to be a fast zombie. I guess it's all determined by how the virus or zombie apocalypse happens. People who have been dead for a while after rigor mortis has set, you know like that classic Halloween style zombie where they've pulled themselves from the earth and the dead are walking, that's slow zombie. But I guess if someone just turns from being human and goes right to zombie I don't see any reason why they couldn't be fast, but I do think over time they will get slower. Because over time they are continually decaying.

GCD: In a zombie apocalypse, who's your survival buddy, Matt Mira or Jonah Ray?

CH: Listen, I love Matt Mira, but I got to go with Jonah, because Jonah is a zombie survivalist. Jonah is a guy that has thought about this a lot. Now if it is something that involves the zombie apocalypse and NASA, then I might ask Matt Mira. He loves the space program, but until it's space zombies, if it's just like regular terrestrial zombies then I have to go with Jonah, because he does have plans. No gunshots, no chainsaws because you can't draw attention. Machete is good, but we also have to understand the nature of how the zombie virus spreads. If you are hacking away at a zombie, you have to be very careful that the splatter-back doesn't hit you in the face and get in your mouth or eyes or any open wounds you might have. Also, don't have unprotected sex with a zombie. Listen, you might get drunk, you might think it'll feel good, in the moment, but ultimately you will [screw] your way to zombie-hood. It's not a good way to go.

GCD: What can you tell us about the show's format?

CH: We're still forming it. The idea of the show is that yes, there will be cast members on, there will be people who are involved with the show. There will be other people on who are celebrity fans of the show, which there are a lot actually. There will be a heavy fan/audience component. The reason I really like the show is because it will be almost an open forum, almost like a Walking Dead town-hall meeting every week. There's an audience there, there's an audience at home. We're taking questions from the live audience, we're taking question from the viewers at home via different social networks or email. Or phone calls, which is a device that transmits your voice. Those different ways we'll be chatting with the audience. To me it sort of feels like, this is the kind of [stuff] I would be talking about with my friends anyway. Like Scott Ian or Brian Posehn. So the fact that AMC is there and wants to put a camera in front of it and make a show out of it? Bonus. I would be doing this every week anyway. Put a camera or don't put a camera [there], I still want to see it.

GCD: What kinds of topics are foremost on your mind?

CH: What I think is so amazing about this show is that it’s not exactly the comic book. Pretty much anyone reading GeekChicDaily is going to know, and has probably read the comics, so they know. They’ve seen how that's playing out. And the universes aren't exactly the same, they're sort of parallel realities. So what's fun about that, other things that are ported over to other platforms you're always going to know, "oh that’s going to happen and this is going to happen." But in this case, we don't really know. I’m curious to see how much of the comic weaves in, or just where the story goes.

GCD: Will you get to see new episodes early?

CH: That's something that I'm going to avoid. AMC has offered to me a bunch of the episodes all at once, and I have refused to watch them all, because I want to watch them week to week, and I know everyone is going to think I’m crazy for doing this. I'm going to watch them week to week as everyone else is watching them so I can react in the same. I don't want to have more information about the show than the audience watching. Because that’s not how it would be. If I were hanging out with my friends I wouldn't know more than them. And I was offered the easy way out, but I want to take the journey. I know I'm going to get a bunch of "f you"s from nerds sitting at their computers. I don't want to be having conversations with people about the show and in the back of my head actually know where it's going. Conversations just aren't as organic that way, because then it's kind of bullshit. I don't want that information, I don't want it in my head yet. I want to watch with the viewing audience.

GCD: What else will you be doing on the show?

CH: We were talking about how the plan is to do behind the scenes. It's basically an interactive extra every week. And it's not just behind the scenes stuff the network is going to force us to do. The plan is to ask the audience: what do you want to see behind the scenes, and then go shoot that stuff so people are actually getting to see what they want from the show.

Talking Dead debuts Oct. 16th, following the encore presentation of The Walking Dead on AMC.

Forward to a Buddy Invite a Buddy