While Zach Galligan is most known for playing the lead roles of Billy and Mark from the Gremlins and Waxwork horror franchises, he has had a 40-year career in both the movie and TV industries.
Horror Geek Life had the great opportunity to sit with Galligan and discuss his iconic roles, the ins and outs of his acting career, and his recent work in the horror genre.
Horror Geek Life: Most of your career has been geared towards the horror and sci-fi genres. Obviously, there are the Gremlins and Waxwork movies, but also stuff like Star Trek: Voyager and Cyborg. Is there something specific that draws you to those genres over others?
Zach Galligan: I don’t know! I guess subconsciously, I love horror and sci-fi so much that I wonder if I try a little bit harder during auditions for those types of projects. You know, if I had a choice between doing a series like Star Trek or doing a series like This Is Us, which is just about family life, or something like that; Party of Five, those types of shows… I’m always going to pick the sci-fi show.
To me, it’s just something more interesting and that I enjoy watching more, so I enjoy doing it more, probably subconsciously because I don’t really feel like I don’t try as hard for the other ones, but maybe my heart isn’t quite as into them as much as it is into horror and sci-fi.
Horror Geek Life: Looking at Gremlins, it was such a massive success that it’s still in regular annual rotations, 40 years later. Your character’s likeness was even in the original Nintendo games. What was your life like during the initial success of those films?
Zach Galligan: Well, I think it was very overwhelming at first. You go from essentially being a complete unknown to walking into restaurants and having the whole restaurant turn around and look at you. At least for a limited time, I would say for the first two years after the film came out, it kind of seemed like any kind of privacy I had was public privacy, and by that, I mean even just the ability to walk into a restaurant and sit down. That was largely gone.
Some people, I think, enjoy that, and I did not. Even though I lived in Manhattan, one of the things I liked about it was that you could, in fact, melt into the crowd and sort of have a level of anonymity due to the sheer number of people you lived with. It was very much an adjustment, and I wasn’t sure how long it was going to last. It felt like it was going to last a very long time, and it’s very difficult to put into words how transformative it is to go from being anonymous to non-anonymous. Some people love it and want it their entire lives, and they drink in the attention. I didn’t hate it, but there were definitely times when I wanted an on/off switch, and there was no off-switch.
That’s the real problem with fame, or recognition, whatever you want to call it. There’s no off switch, so whenever you would like to have privacy, you can’t, and I think that’s why you only see it with a lot of public figures when they snap at a person. The other 364 days, they’ve been very well-behaved, and then they finally have a bad day or a bad moment, and it gets captured, and everyone is like, “Wow, what a jerk!”
You know, the person is only human. They may have found out their mother has cancer, and then someone comes up and gives them a hard time about not giving them an autograph. The person is only human, you know?
Horror Geek Life: That’s a great point. These roles of Billy in Gremlins and Mark in Waxwork have cemented your legacy in the horror community. Is that something you’ve embraced with fans?
Zach Galligan: I mean, any time you can provide enjoyment to people, it’s amazing. The whole reason I became an actor was basically to entertain people. People come up to me, and whether it’s Bad Candy, which I did a couple of years ago, or whether it’s Waxwork or Legion of the Dead, which plays on the SYFY Channel every now and again, or my Tales from the Crypt episode, at horror conventions. People seem to really remember my Star Trek: Voyager episode, in which I’m in for like 15 minutes.
As an actor, any time you get remembered for doing anything, it’s really a blessing. I think it would be deeply frustrating if you’ve been an actor for 30 years, and nobody remembers anything that you did. I would find that to be a deeply unsatisfying experience, and I’m sure some of the character actors who have done that, probably do.
Horror Geek Life: So, you returned to the Gremlins franchise for Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai for a minor role, doing some voice acting. How did it feel to return to the franchise after 40 years?
Zach Galligan: Well, it really felt more significant for me during the Mountain Dew: Zero Sugar commercial. When I did the voiceovers for Secrets of the Mogwai, it was done in this house, downstairs in a closet, underneath my stairs. Because of COVID, there were no studios open. I had to do it with my own professional microphone on a laptop. So, my entire vocal performance in that was done in my closet with a bunch of quilts on the walls to baffle the sound. There wasn’t really a whole lot of connection to it other than just reading stuff about Gizmo.
But, the Mountain Dew commercial, I’m on a set with Gizmo, and he’s the 2020 version! The technological leap from the original Rick Baker Gizmo, which, by the way, at the time, was amazing, it was absolutely incredible. The 2020 version, which was 30+ years later, when people ask me to describe it, I say it was like the difference between a horse and buggy and a Tesla.
As you would hope and expect in 30 years, it was just so perfect. It rarely made mistakes; it synchronized itself perfectly; the people who were trained to use it and put their work in were phenomenal. The whole experience was borderline flawless, and when I left the set, I was a little shellshocked because what it made me realize was if they ever did do a Gremlins 3, and let’s say my part was about what it was in Gremlins 2: The New Batch, which I’m in about half the movie, which took me four or five months, I was thinking to myself that I could probably do all of that in three weeks with the new technology because it won’t require so many different takes.
Sometimes, things would take 10-15 tries, and with this, the most I could see us having to do would be three or four. Even when there was a good take, we’d have to throw it out because there would be a case or a cable. Now, you could just go in with CG and erase the mistakes.
So, seeing Gizmo, and of course, they did a very clever thing, and if you look closely, he has some gray hairs on his chin, and the puppeteer would make him look up at me, and I’d be like, “I feel ya buddy, I got the same thing!”
So, the Mountain Dew commercial was absolutely mind-blowing, and with everyone’s response to it, I’m not sure I’d ever done anything where such a large proportion of people had seen it. When that came out in February 2021, by May, it seemed like 10% of the people that I would run into at any given place had seen it, and that’s just a gigantic percentage of people who have seen something you’ve done. It’s crazy!
Exclusive: Danielle Harris Talks ‘Roadkill’ and Taking the ‘Talk Scary to Me’ Podcast Live
Horror Geek Life: What project have you had the most fun with, and what has been the most challenging?
Zach Galligan: It’s always so much fun to work on a movie, and it’s difficult to explain to someone who’s never done it about how intense of an experience it is, especially, but not limited to, if you have a major or lead role in it. It’s very consuming and exciting to be on a set, for me, at least. It’s almost kind of like a drug, and you do kind of get addicted to it. I have all sorts of fond memories from different projects.
I would say Hatchet III was one of the most fun projects that I worked on, just because of Adam Green, BJ McDonnell, and the cast members Danielle Harris, Caroline Williams, and Kane Hodder. There were so many good people on that shoot. It was so much fun shooting down in New Orleans on location, but it was also incredibly challenging because we were shooting in the actual bayou in June, which is a miserable, miserable place.
There were mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds, and spiders the size of the palm of your hand, and alligators floating around behind you. They would tell me to back away from the water’s edge, and I’d be like, “Why?” and they’d yell, “Gator!” and I’d be like, “Gator?! Come on!”
Of course, it was all night shoots, so you’re getting up at four in the afternoon, shooting until five or six in the morning, and then you’re driving back from the bayou across the bridge into New Orleans and stopping in a diner at seven, get an egg and bacon sandwich, and then going to bed. That’s definitely one of my favorite projects I’ve ever done, and obviously, the first Gremlins was pretty unbeatable.
Horror Geek Life: Do you get more enjoyment from TV work or movies?
Zach Galligan: It doesn’t really matter to me as much as it matters to the pace. You can work on some movies, and it goes very slowly and is just agonizing. If I’m there, I just want things to go. “Let’s do this, let’s shoot it.” Gremlins 2 was very slow-going. Big sets, lots of lighting setup, and a lot of complicated camera moves. It moved at a glacial pace, and that’s a little difficult after four or five months of moving very slowly and deliberately.
So, really, it’s not the medium but the pace and the pace of the people who are working on it.
Horror Geek Life: We have to know. What’s your favorite horror movie?
Zach Galligan: You know, I went to Texas Frightmare, and they had six actors, and John Carpenter from The Thing. I’d never gotten a poster before, and I got one and got all six actors, except for Keith David, who unfortunately got sick the last day, but I got Mr. Carpenter to sign it. I’m pretty convinced that has to be one of the top five horror movies ever made, and certainly my personal favorite.
Retro: ‘The Thing’ Still Stands Among Isolation Horror’s Best
Horror Geek Life: So, you’ve been a part of some major horror franchises. Of course, Gremlins and Waxwork, but also Hellraiser, Tales from the Crypt, and Hatchet. Is there a major horror franchise you wish you could have or could still be in?
Zach Galligan: Well, I tried out for the Patrick Dempsey part in Scream 3 and would have loved to have done that for two reasons: one, to work with Wes Craven and some talented cast members, and two, because that’s an amazingly lucrative horror franchise to be part of.
That would have been a fun one, and fortunately, there’s still time!
Horror Geek Life: Switching it Midnight Peepshow, one of your newer projects, it’s kind of this erotic horror anthology with a bit of a commentary on the Dark Web. What drew you to the project?
Zach Galligan: Well, actually, it was the other way around. The producers were drawn to me, I think. Crew members from Midnight Peepshow had actually worked with me on another film I had done in England called Madness in the Method with Jason Mewes. For whatever reason, the person who had come in and done the voice acting for the Gamemaster had done what they thought was a nice job.
The problem was, for them, they felt the role was missing some kind of element X; they couldn’t quite put their finger on what was missing from it. They wanted to know if I’d be interested to look at it and take another crack at the material, and find what was missing.
They sent me the material, and I was going to England anyway, where they were located, to do a convention, and I read it over on the plane, and when I got off the plane, I told them, “I think he just needs to enjoy it more and have more sadistic fun. I mean, he’s the Gamemaster, and the reading makes it seem like it’s something he’s done before.”
This should be as exciting as the first time he’s ever done it; he should be enjoying it, and it should have a sense of urgency, fun, sarcasm, and dark humor. So, I actually had them bring all of their recording equipment over to my hotel room and set it up. We worked on it for a couple of hours through a couple of versions of it.
I told them to go and assemble it, and if they think it works better than who they had right now, then to use that, and if not, use the original version, that they were “happy with.” As you can see, because we’re talking, they used the second version, and if I’m perfectly honest, after I did it, about a week or 10 days later, I had completely forgotten about it and moved on.
All of a sudden, I got a call a couple of weeks ago asking if I wanted to do press on it, and I was like, “Uhhh, who is this?” and then they sent me the poster, and I thought the poster was cool. I’ve seen way worse posters. And I was like, “Yeah, I’ll talk to some horror peeps and let them know what’s going on.”
Horror Geek Life: What are some of the bigger differences between working with a veteran director like Joe Dante and some of the up-and-comers like the directors of Midnight Peepshow?
Zach Galligan: I’m not so sure I would break it down between veteran and newbie as much as the directors’ backgrounds. For example, Joe Dante, by his own admission, is not really an actor’s director. He’s a former editor, so he’s very good at piecing together the movie and seeing it in his head before he makes it. As he’s admitted, he’s not really great with working with actors, so he just hires the actors he feels are the best for the piece.
Some directors, like Christopher Nolan, or Spielberg, who is very good with kids; they have backgrounds that are more acting-based, technically-based, or computer design-based. Some directors come from a more graphic design background, so their work is more colorful and visual. Ridley Scott comes from a commercial advertising background. He would do all those Chanel No. 5 commercials that were very visual, exotic, and exciting, so, of course, he’s going to have a visually striking style.
So, the question you have to ask yourself is, “What’s the director’s background? What do they have expertise in?” and that will pretty much tell you how much work you’re going to have to do and how much you won’t.
Horror Geek Life: Is there anything you have in the works that you want our readers to be on the lookout for?
Zach Galligan: The only thing I would add, is that I did this really cool short film called Honk, about a guy who keeps hearing this phantom car horn in his neighborhood, and it keeps messing with him. He finally determines that he’s going to find the source and reason for the sound. It’s kind of this little compressed 13-minute episode of The Twilight Zone.
It’s playing at all sorts of film festivals this year across the country. It just played in Sacramento at a horror film festival last Saturday, and it’s really well done and very clever. One of the interesting things about it is that there’s no dialogue of any kind in the short film; it’s kind of just me carrying it for 13 minutes.
It’s sort of like a Twilight Zone episode where the guy is the last man on Earth. It’s just him and the camera. I don’t even look around and go, “Where is everybody?” It’s much more of an internal thing. You don’t know whether I’m dreaming or hallucinating, or am I dead? It’s very interesting. Nowadays, with the technology, everything can be very beautifully shot, and this is no exception. There’s also a nice cameo from Tyler Mane. If people want to look for it or put it in their brains, it’s a pretty catchy title, and they can see it at a film festival; if not, I’ll eventually put it on my social media. I hope people enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it.
Horror Geek Life would like to thank Zach Galligan for the great interview. You can follow him on X (formally Twitter) and Instagram @zwgman. Midnight Peepshow will be available for streaming on digital platforms on February 13th, 2024.
We’re hardworking geeks who love to geek out, but we can’t do it without you! If you enjoyed this article and want to see more like it, please consider tipping our writers. Also, as an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.
