Shaun Of The Dead celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2024It’s been 20 years since Shaun Of The Dead arrived on screens and kick-started Edgar Wright’s iconic Cornetto Trilogy (later completed by Hot Fuzz and The World’s End).
The endlessly quotable, quintessentially British and laugh-out-loud zom-rom-com is an undisputed classic that still holds up two decades later.
It’s also the movie in which the world got to know the loveable comedic duo Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, who star in the zombie apocalypse comedy as a directionless salesman and his lazy roommate, who must ward off an invasion by any means necessary.
If you’re already planning your latest re-watch, here are the behind-the-scenes secrets you probably didn’t know…
The whole concept of the Shaun Of The Dead was inspired by an episode of Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright’s sitcom Spaced. In the episode titled Art, Simon’s character stays up all night playing the video game Resident Evil, when he starts to hallucinate a zombie invasion.
“I wrote an episode of Spaced where my character fights zombies in his flat. We had such a fun time shooting it, we thought we ought to make a zombie movie – like it was that easy,” Simon Pegg told The Guardian in 2020. “We really were so naive. We thought we could do anything.”
Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright in 2004It’s hard to imagine now when we look back at the cult success of the film, but Shaun Of The Dead was not at all guaranteed to be a critical or commercial success.
“I didn’t know if anyone was going to see this film apart from my mum,” Simon Pegg told GQ in a recent retrospective.
Edgar Wright agreed: “I don’t think we had any thought of what it would be beyond the UK. And even that was like, please let it go down well in the UK… everything that came afterwards, travelling around the world with it, was a life-changing bonus.”
Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in Shaun Of The DeadSpeaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Simon Pegg said the success of the film was a “vindication of our intentions” to make the film “very, very British”.
“We didn’t make any concessions to sort of transatlantic-ism,” he added.
We of course now know Nick Frost and Simon Pegg as an inseparable comedic duo, but apparently industry folk were confused as to why director Edgar wasn’t vying for bigger names.
“There were some times people… didn’t understand necessarily why Simon and Nick together was so important,” Edgar told GQ. “There were a couple of times [where they said], ‘Ed is like the funniest part of the film. Why wouldn’t you go with somebody bigger?’.”
He added: “It was literally that thing of, like, ‘Could you get an American in this part? Could Jack Black play this part?’. And we were like, ‘No, it has to be Nick’.”
Speaking during a recent oral history with IndieWire, Edgar recalled how they were asked to look at “casting up” to get some more high calibre names involved for the roles of Shaun’s girlfriend Liz and mother Barbara, which were written specifically for Kate Ashfield and Penelope Wilton.
“We met Kate Winslet about playing Liz and she liked it, but ultimately didn’t do it,” Edgar recalled.
Kate Winslet pictured in 2003Two-time Oscar nominee and (at the time) future winner Helen Mirren was also considered for the role of Barbara.
In an excerpt from the book You’ve Got Red On You – about the making of Shaun Of The Dead – published in Rolling Stone, Edgar recalled the acting icon’s “brilliant” response.
“She read the script and said, ‘I’m passing on the role of Barbara. I would only do the movie if I got to play Ed.’ Her reason was, ‘Well, Ed’s the funniest part.’”
As we know, it was Nick who went on to portray Ed, but we can’t help but admire The Queen actor’s resolve.
Helen Mirren in 2004Speaking to GQ, Edgar reeled off the names of people in the industry who supported the film with press quotes: Quentin Tarantino, Stephen King, Sam Raimi, Guillermo Del Toro, Robert Rodriguez and Frank Darabont being among them.
To say thank you, they even made each of them personalised versions of Shaun’s badge with their own names on it.
The cast of Shaun Of The DeadShaun Of The Dead was clearly an homage to the zombie genre, so much so that it impressed Night Of The Living Dead director George A. Romero.
In a 2008 interview with CinemaBlend, the director recalled: “So I get this message from these guys, and I didn’t know who they were. Some cat named Edgar Wright: ‘I made this movie, I hope you like it.’
“So next thing I know, some cat from Universal shows up like a guy with a bomb suitcase, the fucking print is chained to him. He starts saying, ‘We want to show you this movie at the local theatre. We arranged it.’ I see this movie a little too dark, but it was hilarious, man! And I flipped for it.”
One of the most memorable scenes from the film sees Shaun and Ed toss (very carefully chosen) vinyl records at two approaching zombies. It turns out they couldn’t just launch any old album, they actually had to get permission from the artists.
Edgar recalled Smooth Operator singer Sade Adu being particularly generous with her sign off for Diamond Life being one of the chosen albums. “It’s a tough thing to get someone on board [by] saying, ‘We want to trash your album!’” Edgar said in a quote from You’ve Got Red On You.
“Sade, who I’ve never met, signed her release and was down for it. To me, she’s the coolest person ever. It’s like, you don’t know us from Adam, we actually break your record in the shot, and you let us clear your likeness. That’s amazing.”
The scene also depicts the pair deciding which Prince albums they should use as weapons, but it was nearly David Bowie at the centre of those deliberations.
David Bowie on stage in 2004“The only other bit that we wrote, as far as I recall, is at one point we did David Bowie albums,” Edgar told GQ. “I think it was like: “Hunky Dory, no. Ziggy Stardust, no. The Labyrinth soundtrack…”
“I think we reached out to David Bowie’s publicist, and I heard something secondhand that he was touchy about Labyrinth, so that was a no.”
Don’t Stop Me Now by Queen isn’t the most obvious choice to soundtrack a violent zombie assault, but director Edgar was a huge fan of the iconic band. Thankfully, they were able to get the sign-off for this one.
“We choreographed the entire fight to that song, which was a real worry because it hadn’t been cleared for use and could have ended up being way too expensive,” Simon told The Guardian. “So we wrote a begging letter to Queen guitarist Brian May and he was lovely about it.”
Edgar recalled to IndieWire how there was a “group of disgruntled teenagers who were throwing stones at the camera because we were on their turf”.
He went on: “In an attempt to make peace with the teenagers, we promised that they could be in the film. A couple of days later, they went through makeup, dressed up as zombies and they’re in the film — you can see them when Shaun is next to the garden fence!”
Nick Frost enjoying a Cornetto on the set of Shaun Of The DeadWhen Nick’s character needs a Cornetto to help him nurse a hangover, this was actually borrowed from director Edgar’s real life.
“The appearance of the Cornetto ice cream in Shaun Of The Dead is because it was a hangover cure for me in college and because it seemed like a funny thing for Nick Frost’s character to want on a Sunday morning,” Edgar shared in a piece with Focus Features.
“It’s popped up again because we had gotten free Cornettos at the Shaun Of The Dead premiere, so we thought if we wrote Cornetto into Hot Fuzz, then we would get them at that premiere as well. For some reason we did not, and I felt let down by the lack of free ice cream but by that point it was too late.”
