Over My Dead Body: Don't hate me for looking so beautiful. You'd look radiant, too, if you had two makeup artists sponging on body paint and artfully crafting veins and rotting flesh.
The vision of loveliness at the right is courtesy of the kind people up in Vancouver, British Columbia, who work their magic on Fox's Tru Calling, the freshman drama starring Eliza Dushku.
In the episode, airing Feb. 5 on Fox, I play a dead body Tru's brother Harrison (Shawn Reaves) pulls out of a drawer in the morgue.
Something you should know about being dead: It is hard work. I mean, seriously--I had to lay there without moving, without speaking, without gossiping, without doing a damn thing...Truth be told, I kept falling asleep (see aforementioned call time). That morgue bed was downright cozy, thanks to the quilt that lay beneath me.
Apparently, things weren't so comfy for another reporter who also was there playing a stiff. A guy from a tabloidy mag got sick in the middle of our shoot--after holding up production for a half hour, they had to put a vomit bag in his morgue drawer. Naturally, you'd think it was the deadness, or the morgueness, or even the airplane food from his trip up, right? But when I asked him what happened, he told a different story: "It's just that I've never been on TV before." Love it.
The makeup process takes more than two hours. And since we were the first scene of the day, that meant a 6 a.m. call time--the perfect hour for a night owl like me to look dead.
And the paint goes everywhere--cuticles, nostrils, inner ear (ew, ew, ew!). It took three showers and a Brillo Pad to wash the dead off me.
Of course, this nastiness was old hat to Dushku. "We see dead bodies walking around the set all the time," she told me. "I know this might sound insensitive, but we actually joke around a lot now. I think it's sort of a natural instinct to bring levity to the situation, and so we have people jumping out of sheets and squirting fake blood and doing weird things."
During my scene, it was actor Shawn Reaves sneaking a peek under my sheet--a moment that should appear in Thursday's ep--and planting a smooch on my lifeless noggin'. Mmmm.
Now, the life-or-death question is whether Tru Calling gets toe-tagged come season's end, given the show's tricky time slot (up against Friends and Survivor).
"It's tough," Eliza says. "The network has been so supportive, and they picked us up for a full season, which might not have happened somewhere else. We don't have huge numbers, but they see that there is potential. Our stories are getting even tighter, and hopefully people will respond and find us." This Thursday on Fox is your chance. Just don't ever mention to Eliza how much hotter than her I look
