Playing Dead

 
“LANDING THE ROLE OF A LIFETIME BY PLAYING DEAD”
by Remy Tumin 

[Did you ever wonder where movies and TV shows get people who play dead bodies at crime scenes and accidents?  Most, I suppose, are just “extras” (what SAG-AFTRA, the union that represents TV and film actors, calls “background actors”), the same pool of actors who play bystanders, diners in a restaurant, passers-by on the sidewalk, or fellow subway- and bus-riders.

[But here’s a story about a fellow who actually auditioned for the job . . . in a way.  Read what he did and how he succeeded.  The article below, from the New York Times of 2 November 2022 (section C [“Arts”]), introduces you to one Josh Nalley.  Maybe you saw him “un-alive” somewhere.] 

A lark on TikTok led to a restaurant manager playing a corpse on “CSI: Vegas.”

The Otter Creek Outdoor Recreation Area, near Louisville, Ky., is Josh Nalley’s favorite place to play dead.

This time of year is especially “creepy,” he said. The shuttered campground’s derelict buildings and the fallen leaves scattered on the ground make for an ideal filming location.

Over the past year, Mr. Nalley has posted a daily TikTok of himself playing dead in the hopes of being cast as a corpse in a television series or movie. He’s lain prone along the banks of rivers and streams near his home in Kentucky; had his three dogs lick his face as he propped himself up against a tree; slumped in a car; floated in pools; draped himself over doorways and splattered himself across sidewalks.

Mr. Nalley always included a caption tallying the number of days “of playing un-alive until I’m cast in a move or TV show as an un-alive body.”

By mid-July, and about 200 videos later, “CSI: Vegas” took note. On Nov. 3, Mr. Nalley, 42, will appear on an episode [“There’s the Rub”] of the forensic crime drama on CBS. The Courier-Journal of Louisville reported Mr. Nalley’s big, dead-guy break.

“I was just having fun on the internet,” Mr. Nalley said. He never expected his campaign to actually catch on. He said he developed the concept “out of boredom.”

“I was spending a lot of time on TikTok and trying to figure out what I could do to get on TikTok and maybe get in a movie with as little effort as I thought would be possible,” he said.

Jason Tracey, the showrunner for “CSI: Vegas,” said Mr. Nalley was the perfect person to play “body in the background of the morgue.”

“Nobody has done a more thorough job of auditioning for a nonspeaking role, maybe in the history of television,” Mr. Tracey said. “After 321 pictures or so, he hit his stride and it was time to get called up to the big leagues.”

Mr. Nalley is not a big crime genre fan. In fact, he doesn’t watch much television at all. But he was a fan of the original “CSI.”

He lives in Elizabethtown, Ky., and works as a restaurant manager in the next town over. He usually films multiple videos on his days off at nearby parks, like Bernheim Forest and Saunders Springs, or in his backyard, and posts them throughout the week. Sometimes he’ll even record outside the restaurant where he works.

“A desolate, empty parking lot is always a good place to dump a big body,” he said.

More often than not he films the videos using his phone and a tripod, but every once in a while he engages the help of friends of family. Mr. Nalley’s method is simple: He takes a couple of big breaths and then holds his breath for about 25 seconds and tries to stay as still as possible. That can prove difficult when a rock is digging into his side on the ground.

“You want to move but you’re like, ‘No, just hold it for a little bi[t] longer,’” he said he tells himself.

If he’s playing dead sitting up, Mr. Nalley will usually have his eyes open so viewers can see his face. If he’s lying down, his eyes are typically closed because “half my face is usually pressed into the ground.”

While Mr. Nalley’s intentions are comedic in nature, TikTok does not always agree. He uses the term “un-alive” instead of “dead” and has moved away from gory makeup like fake blood and bullet wounds to avoid running afoul of the platform’s content moderators. (He’s been placed on probation with TikTok several times, he said.) Even Mr. Nalley’s handle, living_dead_josh, was crafted with TikTok’s algorithms in mind.

He tries to capture TikTok trends of the moment and adds music to lighten the mood, including Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” and the “Peanuts” theme song for a Thanksgiving post. One of his favorite videos is from Christmas, when he usually gets together with friends for pizza and beer. Last year, they all played dead together.

“I love that one because they’re family to me, they were all in it.” Mr. Nalley said.

More than 200 videos later, producers at CBS emailed him about a role on “CSI: Vegas.” He didn’t believe it at first, but after an exchange of several emails, the studio flew him to Los Angeles over the summer. Mr. Nalley announced his new gig on Sept. 15, in video No. 321, in a caption over footage of him splayed out on the Hollywood Walk of Fame next to the star of Marg Helgenberger, a longtime “CSI” actress.

The job required him to sit through two hours of makeup to make it appear as if an autopsy had been completed on his character. Over the course of five hours of filming, Mr. Nalley’s instructions were simple and familiar: “Take a deep breath and look dead,” he recalled.

Mr. Tracey, the “CSI” showrunner, said the show and the job of a crime scene investigator “can be unrelentingly grim,” and producers try to find “gallows humor in the profession and in the history of the franchise.”

Mr. Nalley’s quiet presence “was a nice way to keep it light on set that day.”

“We often have dummies down in the morgue,” Mr. Tracey said. “The cast was as surprised as anyone else to have a breathing corpse next to them.”

But he did have some half-serious notes for the aspiring dead body.

“Honestly I would have liked to see a little less breathing, but we can fix that in post,” Mr. Tracey said. He offered an insider tip: “Most people don’t know you’re not supposed to move your eyes at all. The trick is to find a spot and focus even though they’re closed.”

Mr. Nalley said he wasn’t sure what would be next for his career — perhaps another television show or a movie, maybe even one with the filmmaker and actor Kevin Smith, he mused. “I always like his movies and I think we have the same sense of humor,” Mr. Nalley said. “That would be awesome, even just a cameo.”

But for now, he’ll keep posting his daily TikToks for his about 120,000 followers.

“I hope they laugh, honestly,” he said. “I hope they chuckle, and I hope that inspires somebody to be perseverant.”

[Now, this is a kind of acting gig I bet most ROTters have bever heard much about—if anything at all!  Who knew?]

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“A KENTUCKY MAN POSED AS A DEAD BODY ON TIKTOK FOR 321 DAYS. NOW HE’S GOING TO BE ON CSI”
by Kirby Adams

[The Times provided a link in the article above to the Louisville Courier Journal story about Josh Nalley’s TikTok escapades..  It was posted on the paper’s website on 24 October 2022 (Kentucky man posing as dead guy on TikTok gets cast on CSI: Vegas (courier-journal.com)).  It has a little more detail about Nalley’s avocation as an ‘un-alive”—not to be confused with “un-dead”—guy.]

Elizabethtown, Kentucky native Josh Nalley has absolutely zero acting experience but yet, he’s so natural at playing “dead,” he’s been cast to play a dead man on an upcoming episode of the uber-popular “CSI: Vegas” on CBS.

“I got an email from CBS that said they’d seen me on TikTok and wanted to offer me the part,” Nalley told the Courier Journal. “At first I didn’t believe it, but they flew me out to California. It turned out that [film director and actor] Mario Van Peebles was the director for that episode so besides getting cast in the show, I also got to meet him, which was great.”

Nalley was asked to the set of “CSI” after show producers in Los Angeles spotted the Kentucky man’s macabre, yet hilarious series of TikToks.

For the past year, the 42-year-old restaurant manager has campaigned for the role of an “un-alive person” on a “movie or television show” by creating daily posts at various locations around the Bluegrass State. Although the locations are always different, his postures seldom vary.

Most often he’s laying facedown, in snow, dirt, grass, or rocks on the bank of a river, someone’s front lawn, or a local park. Occasionally Nalley changes up his “dead guy” pose and slumps against a crumbling brick wall or reclines head first at the foot of a set of stairs.

Check out his living_dead_ josh TikTok page and you’ll find more than 350 entries with Nalley in hundreds of lifeless scenes, such as lying prone on the banks of the Salt River, splayed out under the Corvette Museum sign in Bowling Green or prostrate on the dining room floor while the family enjoys the Thanksgiving meal.

In his post from Day 91, Nalley is facedown next to a statue in Bernheim Forest. Day 295 finds him resting in peace at the foot of a graffiti-covered wall at the Otter Creek Park Pavillion [sic]. He appears dead as a doornail in snow-covered grass in his post from Day 101.

“I don’t like speaking on camera, but I can lie there and act like I am dead pretty easily,” he laughed. “Having done more than 300 of these posts, I have progressed and gotten better. At first, you could see me breathing, or the fake blood looked really bad. I have gotten rid of using the blood and gotten better at holding my breath.”

It’s the animals that sometimes trip him up. He often gets friends to help make the videos, which once included a few unruly goats and there are many videos that include his dogs.

“I have figured out that it’s best to have some kind of movement in the videos so it doesn’t look like a still photograph,” he told the Courier Journal. “One of my dogs still seems curious about what I am up to. The other one just kind of wanders by and then wanders off.”

When he traveled to California for his debut on “CSI: Vegas,” CBS producers took Nalley to the Hollywood Walk of Fame to pose for one of his now famous “un-alive” videos.

“They wanted me to pose next to [CSI legend] Marg Helgenberger’s star and had asked me to bring a towel to lay on because that sidewalk is really dirty, but I forgot,” he said. “So rather than laying facedown I kind of turned over on my side and played dead. The thing was the sidewalk was really, really hot.”

For his television debut, Nalley spent two hours in makeup and then lay very still on a gurney for the three or four takes it took to get the scene just right.

“We had to redo one take because I had my phone in my pocket and forgot to turn it off,” he said. “Of course, it was a telemarketer calling. That was kind of embarrassing.”

Although Nalley doesn’t plan on quitting his day job, he also doesn’t plan to give up the ghost on this TikTok campaign to play “un-alive” parts in the future. He’s actually received several offers to “play dead” including in a music video and there have been a few low-budget movies that have also reached out.

For now, Nalley is weighing his options while continuing to produce TikTok videos, most of which promote his upcoming appearance on [“]CSI: Vegas,[”] which will air Thursday, Nov. 3 at 10 p.m. on CBS.

“I originally got this idea after seeing a woman on TikTok posting about hot sauce and then she got offers from a bunch of hot sauce companies,” Nalley said.” I thought if I was creative enough playing an un-alive person, I could get the attention of a television show or a movie production company, and how about that, it worked.”

[You can check out Nalley’s TikTok campaign and follow his burgeoning career at tiktok.com/t/ZTR5wXQcV/.

[I’ve never played a dead guy on film or tape, and, while I’m sure I’ve died metaphorically on stage several times—though I didn’t recognize it and wouldn’t have acknowledged it if I had—I only once played a death scene in a play--sort of.

[I was a mortally wounded soldier in a battle scene—the Battle of Trenton on 26 December 1776, a turning point of the American Revolution, to be specific.  I was playing the Hessian mercenary colonel in command of the Trenton defenses, but George Washington made his famous nighttime crossing of the Delaware River and surprised my garrison.  I was rallying my scattered and confused troops when I was fatally shot and fell as my soldiers were routed.

[I said it was a “sort of” death scene because despite appearances that I succumbed on the field of battle, I actually didn’t die until the next day and had one more scene after my “death.”  I surrendered to Washington, pleading, “I beg you to treat my soldiers as men of honor,” and was led off to die off stage.

[So I got to play a rousing “death” scene—most performances garnered thunderous applause as I shouted out my last exhortations and fell to the ground—and then got a little farewell appearance as a lagniappe!  Neat, huh?

[Kirby Adams is a features reporter for the Courier Journal.]