Jon Heder shot to fame as the dorky hero of "Napoleon Dynamite," a Sundance Film Festival award winner that became the biggest teen movie hit of 2004. Ice skates -- and co-star Will Ferrell --then propelled him to even greater heights in the hit comedy "Blades of Glory."
Having done both indies and mainstream Hollywood fare (his credits include "Monster House," "Surf's Up" and "School for Scoundrels," Heder has now branched out into the world of original online programming with "Woke Up Dead," a new live-action sci-fi comedy thriller.
The series, which premieres Tuesday on Sony's Crackle.com as 23 high-quality 4-5 minute episodes, stars Heder as Drex, a 20-something USC student who wakes up one morning to find himself dead.
What was the appeal of doing your first web project?
The idea of doing a series that's a little bit more low-key and easily accessible on the Internet was really cool. You can watch each new episodes whenever you want, and there's also a website involved -- so there's a whole world you can create. You're not just locked into what you see on the screen.
There's the show, and then there's the message boards, behind-the-scenes stuff, product placement. And we have a lot of footage taken by the actors themselves that you can watch. So there's a lot of spillover in creating this whole world that some people in Middle America might believe is totally real. You go out there pretending that this is a real website created by the characters in the film, so it's got a cool multimedia angle.
This is quite a change of pace for you. How would you describe this? Is it a zombie film?
It's definitely a comedy that plays with the conventions of the zombie-horror genre. It's not that horrific, although there are a few scenes that get pretty bloody.
You have some great co-stars -- Wayne Knight ("Seinfeld"), Krysten Ritter ("What Happens in Vegas"), Jean Smart ("Designing Women").
And I get to crush the skull of an irritating co-worker played by Wayne, though it's really just a dream sequence.
How was it playing your first zombie?
I had a blast. Here's the thing -- in the very first sequence he wakes up and discovers that he's now dead, so already we've completely changed the genre piece in a way -- he's a free-thinking zombie, he doesn't believe he's a zombie. But his friends start to realize he may be, since he's officially dead, he has no heart rate, all his vital signs are gone -- but he's also walking around and he has this hunger for brains.
Brains?
(laughs) Yup! So we still have those elements of the zombie genre but we're really playing with it. So it's a tweak on the whole genre.
Obviously you bring something of yourself to every character you play. How much of you is there in Drex?
I think Drex has the weaker parts of myself (laughs).
