Ben Wheatley and the Generation Z cast on C4's new horror comedy

Generation Z is Channel 4’s new horror-comedy series, in which OAPs at a care home become infected by a chemical that turns them into  angry, violent zombies with an insatiable hunger for raw flesh, and bringing them into conflict with the local teenagers. Here creator Ben Wheatley talks about the show, with some thoughts from the cast below…

Interview with Ben Wheatley 

How would you describe Generation Z?

It's in that world of horror but also a disaster movie, setting up the characters and how they deal with the approaching catastrophe that's happened outside the town of Dambury. It’s got echoes of Covid, echoes of the classic zombie genre, of The Crazies and Threads and all sorts of things. I was excited about structuring it around multiple generations so there would be different perspectives that would interact within the story.

How central was Covid to the concept?

We almost made Generation Z in 2019, then it needed a rethink when Covid happened – it went from being predictive science fiction to us all living through it, which was weird. It got put away for a bit, then I did The Meg 2 and it came back into focus. A year or so after lockdown, we started to think it was more relevant than it was before…

What makes the zombie genre so apt for allegory?

I've always thought the zombie film is a gussied-up version of a civil war movie.

It's difficult to make a civil war movie because you have binary sides which you have to define; when you define one side as the dead, it's easier not to feel bad about them being shot. 

Equally, I wanted to change it because it feels guilt free. If you reframe the zombie film, it's really people who are ill versus people who are well, which is less comfortable to watch. 

These aren't zombies, these are people with feelings and thoughts. They have discussions about what's happening to them. You can't think: just kill them.

How far did you decide to push that empathetic side of the zombies?

Diseases make you do things, but so does your own biology, so does living at different ages – you do things and look at things in a different way. 

Generational gaps and misunderstandings open up and you can twist all that up within the structures of genre. You have a pulpy excuse to really put your finger on stuff, because horror films are always at their best when they're talking about the society in which they're set, while making it as fun and engaging for the audience as possible. George Romero’s original Dawn of the Dead is the blueprint for all that.

Did you revel in the freedom of having six hours to tell the story?

It exercised different muscles. You have to relearn every time you do a different genre or medium, be it an advert or viral clip or half-hour comedy show, so for this I had to write to advertising breaks, which was a really interesting discipline to learn.

You tend to direct the projects you write. Was that always going to be the case here?

Yeah, totally. You've got to know how you're going to do it within the budget, especially when you’re working as quickly as we needed to. 

It's a much easier thing to write and direct than it is just to come in and direct something, in some respects. In other respects, it’s terrifying because it's all on you, but the actual physical directing becomes much quicker when you're writing it. You can make decisions on the floor.

There's a lovely sense of both the teenagers and the Boomers forming us-against-the- world gangs. Were you always looking for those parallels?

It was three groups originally – Boomers, Gen X and Gen Z – but the Gen X characters got squashed in the middle. It was structured so there'd be two gangs that would slowly come towards each other. It was important to give the boomer group a voice so it wasn't demonising them and, as the show goes on, you see all these different positions to take which aren't immediately obvious at the outset.

How did you go about casting?

It was an open cast for the younger roles, so we saw a lot of people. My preconceived ideas were open to being destroyed by really brilliant casting moments, which is what happened.

I did a comedy sketch show called The Wrong Door years ago where I met Neil Maskell and Michael Smiley and MyAnna Buring – I'm still raking people out of that show and using them in stuff. 

This feels like the same thing, where I got to audition and work with the cream of the new generation. I also got to work with absolute icons like Anita Dobson.  Robert Lindsay and Sue Johnston. Meeting Dobson was a geeky, amazing moment, and I'd written references to Wolfie Smith into the script without even thinking about it, so I couldn’t believe it became a possibility that Robert might work on it.

A lot of people will get a massive kick out of seeing Sue and Anita really letting go!

Yeah, they were up for anything. Apart from being consummate professionals, nothing could faze them. There was a lot of make-up for Sue in particular, hours and hours of it, which was a bit irksome for her, but she was brilliant. Her first day on set was biting someone's nose off. It was fantastic!

What did you use for the flesh and limbs and so on?

Most of the effects are real and practical. It’s much better to do it all in camera like that, but Sue’s first scene was hysterical to film. The nose was a slightly longer rubber nose that she had to get her teeth into. The internal organs and flesh were all cast and we had edible prosthetics, mouth-safe prosthetics, and non-mouth safe, which meant some very careful planning on the part of the prosthetics team. The blood was strawberry jelly, I think. No one complained about it!

Sue Johnson

I was a bit bewildered at first. It's not the kind of role I usually take, but that's what attracted me. It was so bizarre and so far away from anything I've done, and I found it great fun. . My first scene on my first day was me biting somebody's nose off, and I remember thinking: ‘God, why are we doing this? But he was very supportive – a lovely man with a twinkle in his eye. The supporting artists were fantastic as well, so committed – you didn't feel quite as daft as you guzzled on an arm.

I thought [the make-up] would be boring, but the girls who did it were fabulous and – unfortunately – very beautiful as well. So as I got uglier, I could see these two very beautiful young girls behind me. They were so clever and patient, and they worked for hours. I always made sure I took a bottle of wine into makeup at the end of the day – the three of us would have a glass while I ripped the stuff off my face. By the end stretch when it got to four-and-a-half hours in the chair, I started to get a bit twitchy, but it's not exactly the end of the world, is it?

Robert Lindsay

This  was the kind of thing I never really wanted to do until my kids, my own Generation Z, persuaded me because they're big fans of Ben Wheatley. I didn't know him, but I'm glad I did it because I really enjoyed working with him. He's quite a character with a really wacky

sense of humour. He lets you do your own thing on a take as well as one following his script. Ben also asked my youngest son to come down as a runner – at one point he appears in the sequence when they're doing their A-levels. He had a fantastic experience.

My kids responded to the script far better than I did initially, because they suffered very badly during Covid, during their A levels and going to university. It was really tough on them. Ben's also tapped into the lack of understanding between grown-ups and Generation Z through a horror story, although some people will find it very difficult to take when it gets very ghoulish. I had a body part – a torso with bits missing and a cut through the stomach – made for a certain sequence. After the shoot, the producers rang me and asked if I wanted it, or else they were going to throw it away. I said, "Why not?" They delivered it in a box, which my wife and my young son opened, probably thinking it was a bottle of champagne or something. I heard the scream from them downstairs!

I knew Sue Johnston and Anita Dobson  very well – Anita and I did Play Away when we were kids! It was a bit of a shock when I saw Sue, who had just come out of four hours in makeup. She tried to make a phone call but, because it was face recognition, she couldn’t get the phone to work!

Some of the locations were pretty grim. We filmed in the basement of a market in Newport, a listed building, and the basement was an old abattoir. It was very dank and we were there for weeks. It really captured the mood of the piece and there was no phone connection at all, which Ben was very pleased about. There was a real sense of release when you went up for a cup of tea or a coffee out in the daylight.

Anita Dobson

I got a message from my agent saying that something exciting had just come in the inbox. I read it and thought: I’m not sure about this. So we had a little chat, then I spoke to Ben Wheatley, who was so lovely and sweet and unassuming, and a diamond to work with – you can’t imagine all this stuff comes out of his head! 

Everybody else I talked to spoke so highly of him, including Reece Shearsmith, who I knew from doing an Inside No 9. So I just thought: I've never done this before, maybe I'll find out things about me in the process of doing it, which I did, actually. You may be older, but there are still good parts out there. You’ve just got to be open to them.

I’m not good with blood and gore. When I was first approached to do it, I was a bit nervous about the prosthetics, because I'm a bit claustrophobic and I don’t enjoy having facemasks done, but Ben explained that Janine gets the infection in the arm. Then it creeps up and ends up on her face. He went, ‘Anita, if it doesn't make you laugh, we can’t do it.’ Fortunately, it did!

For the most part, I got off quite lightly. I didn't have to do anything like eating brains or a dog, although I did have a baptism of blood and gore on my very first scene when I had to bite a neck. They had a pump so that, as soon as you look like you've locked down, it starts squirting. They must have overloaded the pump because it went everywhere: in my eyes, up my nose, in my ears, all over the walls, all over everybody in the room… 

The only scene I found really tough was a scene in the forest where we feast on a lot of tourists. When you’re actually eating pieces of people, that somehow resonated quite hard with me, but we did it,

it was fun, and we had a boogie afterwards. Once you're doing it, it, you know it's a game.. And the blood itself was raspberry jam, strawberry jelly, all stuff that's not good for you!

 Ava Hinds-Jones

I am anti-horror and anti-gore. I don't watch any scary films, but my mum and her boyfriend are so into Ben and everything he does, so as soon as I got the job, we sat down and watched High Rise. I got a feel for his vibe and, having worked with him, I see what a genius he is.

On my second day of filming, I had to shoot this 85-year-old in the head and was, like: "I'm in a Ben Wheatley drama, for sure!" 

[My favourite scene was] when I was vomiting and then eating my vomit out of the loo. It was kind of tasty! I could have eaten way more of it: grapefruit and tomato juice sounds like a weird combination, but actually it’s really yummy.

It was one of the best jobs I've ever done. Everything was so ridiculous. You'd arrive on set and go: Oh, I'm falling in a brain today, I’m eating my own vomit today. You can't take yourself too seriously in those moments

My last day was running away from zombies, then the next day I was being solemn in a big gown on a Tudor estate, standing opposite Mark Rylance for Wolf Hall. It was just the biggest mindfuck.

Buket Komur

I was surprised by how insane it is – every page I turned, I was thinking: Are we going to be able to show this? It was really, really funny at the same time, and once we got to set I knew it was going to be a really good time. Aside from how wacky and ridiculous it is, the themes Ben Wheatley has incorporated feel real: he’s tapped into things that will speak to what a lot of people are feeling right now.

The generational divide is a big one, how different people in the country live, especially the old and the young. Young people are really worried about our future. Sometimes it feels like people might not understand the anxieties we're facing with student debt, the cost of living and not being able to afford to rent somewhere, these things that the previous generations perhaps didn't face in quite the same way. 

Jay Lycurgo

On the first day, we did five scenes in a row for the house party with no cutting, like theatre. Then [Ben] would  say, ‘All right, off script, just see what happens.’ It's terrifying when he says it, but as soon as he says ‘Action!', the whole anxiety just lifts. I just feel super confident with improv now, which I didn’t think I ever would. 

I really like Shaun of the Dead, and this has remnants of that. Misfits a little bit as well, because the teenagers didn't feel superficial, they felt like real young people with nonsense going on in their heads. Most zombie TV things are dead serious, so it was good to do something that had some drama but also good twists and dark comedy.

Paul Bentall

I didn't really know anything about Ben Wheatley, but my daughter, who is also an actress, thought very highly of him, and there is a long historical line of this sort of violence and extremity in drama, from Jacobean drama all the way back to the Romans. I did a play called Thyestes in the 1970s by the Roman writer Seneca, in which the king is fed his own 

The whole process was cathartic: if you're biting somebody's neck and you've got blood all over your face, you find yourself laughing. We did scenes which were so violent and bloody that the whole room was in fits by the end. It's very odd because you're talking about something completely horrific, but the only response is to laugh.

 Johnny Vegas

 For a while, my obsession was surviving the zombie apocalypse. When my son was going to school in Kew, my big idea was learning how to hotwire a boat on the Thames, or to get into Kew Gardens because they'll have all the seeds to repropagate, and they’ve got the high walls. So to come in and play someone who fails so spectacularly was a tough ’un.

I've worked with Ben lots of times. He directed two series of Ideal for BBC Three, and we shot a pilot many moons ago. I'm a fan of all his work. If you've worked with him, it's like a conch: he blows it, you drop everything and assemble. He's fabulous because he can combine humour and darkness, which is how I like my comedy. 

Me being a massive zombie fan was really exciting too, and as an actor, he's great to work with. You will run stuff off the script, then he lets you off the leash to ad lib and play around. You never know which version is going to get used. As a comic and someone with ADHD, it’s good to know you can at least put your ideas out there. 

[Also], he doesn't shoot it to death. It moves pretty quickly and you never get to the point where you've done a scene so many times that you’re making a mess of it. Ben writes amazing scripts, but he's not at all precious and always wants to see if anybody else can bring anything to them. That's a dream gig for me – the best job I had in ages.

• Generation Z starts on Channel 4 at 9pm on Sunday.

Published: 22 Oct 2024