“They’re dead. They’re…all messed up.” -- Sheriff McClelland, Night of the Living Dead
Before filming could begin, Image Ten looked to cast the core characters caught up in the zombie menace. Most crucial was the lead, Ben, who would have to carry much of the movie on his shoulders. As originally written, Ben was a resourceful but rough and crude-talking trucker, a role initially envisioned for Rudy Ricci. Those plans changed when a 31-year-old African-American actor named Duane Jones competed for the part.
“A mutual friend of George’s and mine was a woman by the name of Betty Ellen Haughey,” producer Russ Streiner relates. “She grew up in Pittsburgh, but at that time she was living in New York and she knew of Duane Jones. He’d started off in a suburb just outside of Pittsburgh, yet he was off in New York making a living as a teacher and an actor. Duane happened to be in Pittsburgh visiting his family, and we auditioned him. And immediately everyone, including Rudy Ricci, said, ‘Hey, this is the guy that should be Ben.’”
Director George Romero agrees with that recollection: “Duane Jones was the best actor we met to play Ben. If there was a film with a black actor in it, it usually had a racial theme, like 'The Defiant Ones.' Consciously I resisted writing new dialogue ‘cause he happens to be black. We just shot the script. Perhaps 'Night of the Living Dead' is the first film to have a black man playing the lead role regardless of, rather than because of, his race.”
(Contrary to that opinion, oft-expressed by Romero and others, Jones was not the first black actor to be cast in a non-ethnic-specific starring role; Sidney Poitier earned that distinction in 1965 playing a reporter in James B. Harris’ nuclear sub suspenser “The Bedford Incident” and, the following year, portraying an ex-military man turned horse-breaker in Ralph Nelson’s western “Duel at Diablo,” doubly ironic given "Duel’s" racial theme, albeit one centering on Native Americans.)
At that, black actors were no strangers to Latent Image ads. “In looking at some of those old [mid-‘60s] commercials,” says co-writer John Russo, “we always had black actors and we always gave a lot of work to people who had a tough time getting it. That was our nature, so we didn’t blink at casting a black actor in that role.” The slim, handsome Jones was himself was quite familiar with aspects of the ad world, having earlier posed as an Ebony magazine model in layouts selling everything from liquor to Listerine.
While still earthy and capable, Ben acquired an at once intense and understated quality that Jones brought to the role. According to the late Karl Hardman: “His [Ben’s] dialogue was that of a lower class/uneducated person. Duane Jones was a very well-educated man.
