“It felt really natural, right away, like a real family get-together,” Woody Harrelson says of reuniting with the cast of Zombieland for the forthcoming sequel, Zombieland: Double Tap. The new movie reaches cinemas 10 years after the original. “I hadn’t seen Abigail [Breslin, who plays Little Rock] in all that time," Harrelson continues, "but in the meantime I’d done a couple of other movies with Jesse [Eisenberg], and spent a lot of time with Em[ma Stone], just as buddies, so it wasn’t as shocking as it would have been if we hadn’t seen each other in 10 years.”
This, unfortunately, led to a rather awkward initial encounter. "Woody and Jesse had no idea who I was when I walked on the set!” laughs Breslin while talking with our sister publication Total Film. “They literally thought I was trying to stalk them or something. Emma was the only one who remembered me, so it was kind of funny. They were like, ‘You’re older now!’ I said, ‘Well yeah, it’s been 10 years, that’s how time works!’ It’s been hilarious how shocked the fans of the movies have been. They’re like, ‘How has Abigail Breslin aged so much?’ I was like, ‘It’s called puberty, oh my God!’”
Above, you can see an exclusive image from Total Film of Emma Stone, back as Wichita, the older sister of Breslin's character. Below, Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg are pictured similarly practice shooting.
In the 10 years since the first movie, a lot has changed. The intervening decade has seen both a decline in household/garden maintenance and an increase in the zombie population – the two things may be connected… “You definitely see evidence of the passage of time in the way that the environment has started to change," says director Ruben Fleischer, who also returns for the sequel. "Nature is coming back and overgrowing the buildings and you see vines climbing up the exterior of the White House. There just aren’t the people to trim the hedges any more."
Harrelson adds: “It’s more dangerous now, in the sense that zombies have completely taken over. There used to be a lot more humans roaming the earth, but now that’s shifted remarkably – but we’re also incredibly confident in how we deal with them because we’ve been doing it so long at this point.”
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