Woody vs. the Zombie

Several years ago I was an extra in a movie with Morgan Freeman called Along Came a Spider. We spent three days, long hours each day, shooting a scene where he enters a commuter train, sees something suspicious, pulls his gun out, etc. etc. My job was to duck every time he reached into his denim jacket to get his gun.

I don't know how many times I ducked but it was a lot. (I had longer hair then, which would flair out when I turned my head and hid, and a friend who moved away once told me when he missed me he would play the scene from the film, see my hair and feel better. But I digress.)

A couple of years later I was on a Metro train in DC and a man who looked a fair amount like Morgan Freeman and was wearing a denim jacket boarded the train and reached into his jacket, in precisely the same way Mr. Freeman had. So I ducked.

I'm sure I looked both racist and crazy, but really it was sort of a Pavlovian response.

So when I read this article about Woody Harrelson getting into an altercation with someone he thought was a zombie, following several weeks of filming an intense zombie movie, I nodded my head and understood where he was coming from. I'm guessing a lot of actors understand exactly what happened.