Zack and Deborah Snyder say that it cost millions of dollars to scrub Chris D’Elia from Army of the Dead and add Tig Notaro to the ensemble.
In an interview with Vanity Fair published Friday, the husband-wife movie-making duo said it was a “fairly easy” choice to remove the scandal-plagued D’Elia from their zombie heist film and do reshoots with Notaro. But it was a costly decision.
“It was an expensive one, that’s for sure,” said producer Deborah Snyder. Director Zack Snyder put the figure at “a few million.” Added Deborah Snyder, “I will say, Netflix did the right thing. They put their money where their mouth is.”
Last summer, D’Elia was accused by multiple women of sexually harassing underage girls. In February, the comic-actor posted a video on his YouTube page, saying “I do have a problem,” but maintained he did nothing illegal. D’Elia was dropped by CAA amid the scandal.
Notaro, who plays helicopter pilot Marianne Peters in the film, said in April she was taken aback by the response from the first trailer, which resulted in her trending as “Sexy AF.”
A guest on The Tonight Show, the comic-actress said then, “So much has changed, Jimmy. It’s really been nuts around here since I was trending for being ‘sexy AF.’ I didn’t even know what ‘AF’ was, to be honest. My friends were texting me images of Twitter, like ‘You’re trending for being badass and sexy AF.’ And I was like, ‘What is that?’” (AF is social media shorthand for “as fuck.”)
In the Netflix film, Dave Bautista leads a cast that includes Notaro, Ana de la Reguera, Omari Hardwick, Hiroyuki Sanada, Huma S Qureshi, Garret Dillahunt, Raúl Castillo, Nora Arnezeder, Matthias Schweighöfer, Samantha Win and Rich Cetrone.