On the autopsy table
The cast and creators of forensic drama series Coroner reveal how they make corpses look real for TV.
Season 3 of drama series Coroner (2019-now) has dropped even more creepiness on our screens, Mondays on Universal TV (*117) at 20:00, with its ultra-realistic sets and macabre corpses as Toronto-based coroner Jenny Cooper (Serinda Swan, Chloe in sport dramedy Ballers, 2015-2019) investigates the murders. So it’s time to do a little investigating of our own as Serinda and executive producers Morwyn Brebner and Adrienne Mitchell reveal more about the show’s prop bodies…
LIVING WITH DEATH
How do you deal with the visual horror of the prop bodies?
Adrienne: We are in the world of make believe, but what does start to feel normal, which is strange, is gross things.
The autopsies and the mystery of the body and how Morwyn and the team come up with all sorts of terribly grotesque aspects of how the body is a clue to the murder, whether it’s strange things embedded in organs or whatever. We’ve become desensitised to gore. Morwyn: I feel the same. We’re making up fake deaths. But what I do feel sometimes is that I’m on set and we’re pulling a piece of glass out of a prosthetic that looks real and I’m like, “That’s amazing!” and then I’m like, “Wait a minute…”
KEEPING RESEARCHERS BUSY
And how authentic are the prop bodies and their “causes of death”?
Serinda: As authentic as possible. We’ve got a pathologist on set with us at all times – and the writers always consult the pathologist as they’re putting together the scripts and building the sets. Adrienne: It’s funny because the writers come to the pathologist with the most impossible scenarios [and you think] that it would never happen, and then the two of them together come up with something that actually could happen. It’s the wild imagination and the pathologist says, “Absolutely, it happens.” Morwyn: When we (as the writers) get a yes from our pathologist, we know to get out (of the room). Get out if you get a yes. “Is it possible if we found this body like this, that there could be like this and there’s something weird inside their organs?” The crazy thing too, is that you’ll ask, “Could this (outlandish thing) happen?” and they’ll say, “Yeah,” and you’re like, “I thought we were just making up this crazy thing!”
How closely do you look at the props? Serinda: I love it, I absolutely love it. It’s so weird, but what’s crazy is that we live inside our bodies for however long we get gifted on this planet, and we don’t ever really understand or know what’s going on on the inside. I saw lungs for the first time, it was like, “That’s what a lung looks like!?” Or you will pull out something and ask, “What’s this thing?” and they’ll say, “That’s a spleen.”
READY, SET?
And there’s a rumour about the show’s morgue set being haunted…
Serinda: You know those bug zappers that work with electricity? We put one on set and every once in a while, it will kill a fly and it makes this zapping noise, and so we always hear it and then we see a little bug fall down. Often it will happen and there are no bugs around. We all kind of look at each other and go, “Okay, cool. I’m sure it’s just a small fly that we didn’t see.” But yeah, every once in a while, there are some odds things that happen, like things get moved. But it’s the bug zapper that tends to get us…
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