Now, David obviously didn’t plunge his knife into our little actor’s chest, but it wasn’t VFX, either. It was a fake corpse built by a talented artist named Justin Raleigh, whose company Fractured FX builds prosthetics for many hit shows, including one of our personal favorites, Steven Soderbergh’s The Knick (if you haven’t seen that masterpiece, stop reading this and go watch it immediately!). In fact, Justin’s designs for that show were so realistic that that the Boston Children’s Hospital now has him build “simulation” bodies to train their surgeons!
About a month after we spoke to Justin about the job, we received our very own dead body of Noah Schnapp (the wonderful young actor who plays Will). If you have a dark side like we do, this was a creepy and fun present. We immediately took Noah’s mom aside, told her we had something to show her, and led her into a dark closet where we had propped up this frighteningly realistic corpse of her son. She was startled at first, and we felt like maybe we crossed a line… But after the initial shock, she loved it. Before long, she was taking pictures with her child’s fake corpse and texting the photos to all her friends. Yeah, Noah has a pretty cool mom.