Fighting Zombies In The Winter In Ontario – Interview With DEADSIGHT Star Adam Seybold

Writer/actor Adam Seybold has been working in the trenches, writing and starring in low-budget (mostly horror) genre projects which have a tendency to show consistent profits. In Deadsight, writer/co-star Liv Collins plays a pregnant police officer about to go on maternity leave. On her last day on the job, she wakes up to a world ravaged by a nightmarish plague of the living dead. Amidst the chaos and violence, she finds a man (Seybold) who is virtually blind, helpless, and has a mystery shrouding his past.

From there, the unlikeliest duo since The Defiant Ones must put their heads together and find a way to safety through a living hell of the living dead. Directed by Jesse Thomas Cook (Monster Brawl) and written by Liv Collins (Polished) and Kevin Revie (To Hell with Harvey), the film stars Collins, Seybold (Let Her Out) and Ry Barrett (The Demolisher). Seybold recently spoke exclusively with Film Inquiry about Deadsight.

Jim Dixon for Film Inquiry: We just watched Deadsight the other night – you’re very good in it.

Adam Seybold: Thank you.

What was your biggest challenge as an actor starring in Deadsight?

Acting with your eyes closed…

Adam Seybold: The most obvious one is playing somebody who’s visually impaired. There was a moment when I was maybe going to try to method my way through it and just wear the bandages all day and have people help me and all that kind of stuff, but on a shoot like this, in Grey County in the winter time, I gave it up by lunch of the first day. [Laughs] But that was actually enough, I think, to kind of get the sense of what it’s like. But it is a tricky sort of mind game that you have to play with yourself where you have to pretend not to see. There were times doing stunts, or fights with zombies, or shooting firearms where safety is of the utmost concern.

So that’s where the trick – how do I play this on a moment by moment basis. A lot of times it was just acting with my eyes closed. As an actor, especially on film, the one weapon that you have is your eyes but for most of the movie I just didn’t have that. So it was about trying to convey thoughts in a slightly different way whether it’s through body position or what have you. That was the biggest challenge. That and the elements. Just being up north in rural Ontario in the winter time. Those first two things, that was enough.

The movie does have a very chilly, autumnal look and I was going to ask if it was as cold as it looks. I take it the answer is yes.

Adam Seybold: Oh, it was colder. Whatever you think, it was definitely colder. The nice thing is, there again, with the acting challenge of being visually impaired, and then with the elements, you are not in your own head. I have a tendency to operate from a position of self-loathing when I am on set and when I am acting. But with this one I really didn’t have time to do that – to overthink things. It was really just being in the moment and connecting with Liv Collins or Ry Barrett or any of my other scene partners, like the zombies, and getting out of my own way, literally. So yeah the elements definitely make it a challenge for sure.

I thought I noticed a few nods to Night of the Living Dead in Deadsight, and of course if you’re doing a movie like this, I’d think you either you deliberately do it differently from Night of the Living Dead, or you just as deliberately do it the same way. Is Jesse Thomas Cook a fan of the original Night of the Living Dead?

Adam Seybold: I don’t know the answer to that. In the interest of full disclosure, I‘ve never seen Night of the Living Dead. I mean I’ve seen bits of it so I feel like I’ve seen the whole thing over time but I have never seen it from beginning to end. And so when you are making a zombie movie these days, especially with the genre as rich as it is, that started with that film and that story, look it’s really just about playing the simplicity, and I guess this is going to sound kind of pretentious, but the simplicity of your own truth and how you would respond as that character and then sort of letting all of the references and all that stuff just kind of drop away so that you’re not thinking about who did this, what is this like – you know you have to be aware of stuff, but as an actor you can’t be in the meta of it. You have to just kind of drill down into the simplicity of what the script is allowing you to do and let Jesse and the writers take care of or protect you from the sort of meta-commentary of the genre.

Looking at the credits on Deadsight is almost like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Virtually everyone on this movie has worked with somebody else on this movie somewhere else. It must have been a little like old home week. How did you all hook up initially?

Adam Seybold: My entrée into genre filmmaking in Ontario was on a movie called Exit Humanity, which was also produced by the Foresight Features guys. It was directed by John Geddes, and was my first zombie movie. We had such a blast, and I think it’s like that old adage that you don’t really know a person until you do a day’s work with them. Shooting for five or six weeks up north near Collingwood on a zombie movie we all got to know each other pretty well. And those guys – the way they do it – it’s very much a collegial family kind of atmosphere which sort of permeates all of their pictures, and I’ve been lucky enough to have been asked back a few times.

So, I’ve done a couple of films for John, I’ve done a film with Matt Wiele and I had never done one with Jesse before but on this one, I was working with Liv who I had just worked with on John’s previous film, a film called Creep Nation, where we play brother and sister, and so we already had an established relationship and it just makes the working day easier if you like the people that you are with. You’re not just off on your own. So if I’m in scene with Liv or Ry Barrett or Carrie Cathrae-Keeling or whomever you’re working with – the scene is like an outgrowth of the time that you are spending together all kind of up there against the elements. I think that’s something that they really try to keep as a fabric in what they do.

Liv Collins co-wrote the screenplay to Deadsight, if I remember correctly.

Adam Seybold: Yes.

Presumably she was writing the role of Mara for herself, and she gave herself some wonderful challenges, playing a very, very pregnant cop dealing with a zombie apocalypse. Did she have you in mind for the role of Ben when she wrote it?

“As an actor you want to everybody’s last choice…”

Adam Seybold: I’d like to think so – I mean they told me that’s true. As an actor you want to be everybody’s last choice, not necessarily their first choice. So as long as you’re the last choice it doesn’t matter. So I don’t actually know if they wrote it specifically for me, but I think that once we started working together, we were able to kind of tailor scenes to our relationship – to the way that we relate to each other, and things like building into the backstory that my character had a wife and a daughter. My wife and I have a son, so I’ve been with a woman who was very pregnant and giving birth and all that kind of stuff. 

So that was stuff that I could bring to it that maybe another actor wouldn’t in that particular case. In some of those scenes Liv’s obviously very pregnant, she’d given birth before, and I was the partner of a woman going through birth, so it made things kind of very easy, and Liv is just a trooper. She’s also one of the most consistently hilarious actors that I’ve ever worked with, so it makes the working day a lot easier.

You’re already a double threat yourself, a writer and an actor, if memory serves. In fact, a playwright and a screenwriter. Do you have any ambitions to direct?

Adam Seybold: I do. There’s a couple of projects that I’m gearing up to make as a director. I think with the time I have spent as a writer and as an actor it’s just sort of a natural evolution to kind of tell my own story. It’s just about finding the right project and finding something that I don’t want to just direct for no reason, or just because I can – it’s more about finding a story that I can tell. But I have directed theater, you know, some of my original work, and what not, but directing a movie is for sure an ambition of mine.

As an actor I’m sure it has occurred to you at some point that the line of distinguished and well-known actors that cut their teeth on horror movies is pretty impressive. Tom Hanks, Leonardo DiCaprio, Amy Adams, Matthew McConaughey, Renée Zellweger, Johnny Depp, Jack Nicholson, Kevin Bacon, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Jamie Lee Curtis, come to mind. Do you have a sense of joining a proud tradition of low budget horror alums?

Adam Seybold: It wasn’t until I started writing horror movies with the guys at Black Fawn Films – I wrote a film called Let Her Out for Cody Calahan, the director. And, it wasn’t until I started working with Cody that I think I realized that I wasn’t necessarily as aware of the genre as I could have been, but once I started writing it I started to realize the degree to which horror permeates all of these different levels of the art form. And it’s such a saleable, marketable genre number one, but also it provides opportunities for actors to put themselves in extreme situations, and I think that that’s what we want.

Actors all the way down at my level or all the way up to the upper echelons of movie stardom, you want to be in extreme situations so that you’re activating your imagination, and scary movies are the way to do that. And, the interesting thing about horror – and I think this has always been true but I think it’s now part of the mainstream with films like Get Out and Hereditary and others, of course, but as a genre it’s starting to hold like really cool cultural ideas as well.

So it’s a thrill ride but also in the bargain you’re getting some kind of unique take on where we are now. I think that with everything that is going on in the world, horror movies are almost best equipped to do that, and so for me as an actor, acting in these movies, I don’t see it as there’s a demarcation line between different types of movies. It’s all stories at the end of the day, and horror movies specifically – I’ve really grown to love the genre – specifically all the stuff that’s being made here in Ontario with a lot of independent filmmakers who are just doing it.

What do you think is behind the current wild popularity of zombie-themed properties? It seems that for a long time Night of the Living Dead was pretty much the only zombie apocalypse movie. And now it’s everywhere.

When the President of the United States is like a character out of Stephen King

Adam Seybold: I think that’s a really good question and I think – I’ve thought a lot about it over the last sort of three years or so – and I think that all the zombie apocalypse movies are partly due to the fact that it does feel like the planet is under threat. The notion of an apocalypse or dystopia doesn’t feel that out of reach. So I think that’s one of the reasons why it’s popular – I think we all have that – not fantasy – but we all wonder what would I do if all of this went away.

This whole cultural infrastructure and this whole civilization, what if it all went away tomorrow, how would I survive? How would I get my family through it, and all of those different things, and I think that that’s one of the reasons why. We could talk for six hours just about that one idea, but I think one of the reasons is also that the President of the United States right now is Trump and he’s like a character out of Stephen King.

There are those who would suggest that he’s reminiscent of the villain in The Dead Zone...

Adam: Or Randall Flagg in The Stand.

RLJE Films released Deadsight on July 2, 2019 on DVD, On Demand and Digital HD.