ZOMBIE NATION

The Dead Don’t Die cast get horrific…

“It’s unapologetic,” says Caleb Landry Jones. Well, that’s one way to describe Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die, a film packed with stars, from Jarmusch regulars Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton and Adam Driver to musicians like Tom Waits, RZA and Iggy Pop to newbies like Jones and Selena Gomez. “Jim’s first three films mean a lot to me.” adds Jones, “It was a dream come true to be a part of anything in one of his films.”

With most of the actors playing residents of Centerville, facing off with a zombie plague, it’s typically droll casting from Jarmusch. Jones is comic-book store owner Bobby Wiggins; Murray is cop Cliff Robertson (named after an actor, like his character Don Johnston, in Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers); Swinton is swordwielding Scottish mortician Zelda Winston; Tom Waits a hobo called Hermit Bob... the list goes on. “It’s an incredible cast,” says Jones.

Swinton seems to have forgotten prodding Jarmusch towards The Dead Don’t Die, during the making of vampiric romance Only Lovers Left Alive. “I remember thinking at the time, ‘I bet Jim won’t be able to resist making a zombie film next,’” she says. “He did quite soon after we made the film say to me, ‘We’re going to make a zombie film,’ way before we had a script.”

She calls her relationship with the horror genre “pretty nascent”. “I’ve been dabbling recently with Luca Guadagnino [on the remake of Dario Argento’s Suspiria], a certain amount of jump-scaring. I’m very unversed in horror. I wasn’t exposed to horror when I was young and I’m slowly working out that it thrills me to the core, and it’s not a scare that I want to avoid.”

Gomez, who plays out-of-towner Zoe, admits she’s in love with the genre. “Growing up, my dad used to let me watch them, just to scare me so he could laugh. But I became obsessed. I like everything from Zombieland to 28 Days Later to The Walking Dead and the Netflix series Black Summer. I’m obsessed with zombies.”

Of course, when you’ve got Bill Murray, a star of Zombieland, then you’re laughing (quite literally). He’s been working with Jarmusch ever since they made a short for 2003 anthology Coffee And Cigarettes. “He’s a barrel of laughs,” Murray drawls. “He is. He doesn’t need my help with the sense of humour, particularly. We just work on posture and manners!”