Generation Z stars: "We are growing old quite disgracefully"

Now imagine what would happen if the boomers became zombies overnight.

"They would get rid of their children," Robert Lindsay grins in delight. "The young are in the way. They’re good for the appetite. Very good protein!" He laughs out loud.

Lindsay is speaking from experience. He’s one of the stars of Generation Z, a new horror comedy on Channel 4 from cult director Ben Wheatley.

In the series, an experimental bio-weapon literally falls off the back of a military lorry in the fictional town of Dambury, creating a plague that turns the old into monsters but leaves the young unscathed. Or rather, initially unscathed. The old are hungry and angry; the young are bemused, irritated, and then… dead.

The cast spans the generations. Lindsay is joined in the upper-age bracket by, among others, Anita Dobson and Sue Johnston; the Gen Xers are led by Johnny Vegas and Rebecca Humphries alongside a host of rising stars like Lewis Gribben and Viola Prettejohn.

Dobson and Johnston, both of whom play zombies, still seem surprised at their roles. "I’d just done an episode of Inside No. 9, which was a bit of a departure for me in itself," Dobson recalls. "When I first spoke to Ben and I said to him, 'It’s very dark…' he said, 'Anita, if we don’t have fun with it, if we don’t make them laugh, we can’t do it.' Which was what sold me."

Were they fans of the genre? "Not really, no," Dobson laughs. "Bloody gore is not really on my go-to list. It’s a whole new world. Suddenly you get asked to do things like FearFest – who knew there was a FearFest? And who knows what a FearFest is? But Comic-Con will embrace this wholeheartedly. And so we’ll go along to do the signings, and there will be people there with their heads hanging off." She seems positively cheerful at the prospect.

On screen, Johnston – who plays a militant pensioner, one of the first to fall victim to the mysterious gas, and ends up leading a gang of infected people to secure food and evade capture – spends much of the time in impressive prosthetics.

They were so impressive that Lindsay walked into makeup on his first day and saw her furiously trying to ring someone but finding her iPhone facial recognition had no idea who she was.

"Oh, gosh," she shakes her head giggling. "I was getting so frustrated with my phone. Robert wandered in and I had my innards and all sorts hanging out. We’re old friends, but we’ve never worked together before, and it wasn’t the perfect first on-set meeting."

Lindsay’s character does wear some prosthetics – it’s difficult to explain without spoilers – but he remembers the day Channel 4 sent him his stomach. His wife and daughter thought it was an Amazon delivery.

"I knew what was inside, so I let them open it, and all of a sudden, my torso appeared with cuts and blood and pipes," he laughs. "I’ve been asked to auction some things this year in aid of Hampstead Theatre after they had their Arts Council grant cut, so I’ll be selling off my stomach for them."

For fans of Lindsay more familiar with him as the patriarch in My Family, there’s a pleasure in seeing him play a paranoid activist and conspiracy theorist who’s clued in to the government’s attempts to hush things up. His basement radical has an echo of his starring role in the sitcom Citizen Smith, playing Wolfie, the leader of the Tooting Popular Front.

"Ben Wheatley was a huge fan of Citizen Smith," Lindsay nods. "One of the things he sent me initially was a picture of Wolfie, so yes, I think that was in his mind. My character supplies recreational medical treats for the youngsters – he’s a drug dealer – and he’s a former scientist and activist with a mysterious background. For me, the role was a no-brainer, not least because my boys are huge fans of Ben Wheatley."

Dobson and Johnston – also more familiar to audiences for their long stints in family favourites EastEnders and The Royle Family respectively – still aren’t quite sure why the horror director, whose last movie was the Hollywood blockbuster Meg 2: the Trench, turned to them. Dobson suspects Reece Shearsmith suggested her after she played a violent gangster in an Inside No. 9 episode described by Radio Times as the "goriest yet".

"When I read it, I thought, 'Oh, I don’t get this, really,'" Johnston shakes her head. "I was totally naive. I didn’t absorb what we were up to until I came out of makeup and realised we had to go into prosthetics for another three hours." They all burst out laughing.

But the best horror is always a metaphor for something, and Generation Z has serious undertones. Wheatley deals with pandemics and lockdowns, and most of all, the way society treats the elderly. In the case of Dobson and Johnston’s characters, they’ve been abandoned by their families when the infection arrives – and part of their motive is revenge.

"It’s a relief to get out of the residential home, which is, my character believes, where they put you when they’re finished with you," Johnston grins mischievously.

"There’s a pile of resentment which I’d probably feel if I got shut in a residential home, which I probably will be. It’s that whole thing of let’s get rid of the old, we don’t need the old. It’s the physical side of being old which I find so bloody annoying. And so, to be regenerated is potent."

Dobson’s character has no intention of giving up her infected status when the authorities arrive. "She likes who she’s become," she grins. "She really takes it on. It’s unfortunate she has to eat people to stay like this, but so be it."

Then she gets serious. "The thing is, getting old is scary. Of course it is. You know it’s going to happen to you at some point, but you don’t really connect to it until you start to see it on your face, feel it in your knees, and suddenly you think, 'Oh, here it comes.'

"But I wake up in the morning, I think, 'Well, nothing’s dropped off. I’m good to go.' Do as much as you can while you can. Have a sense of humour. If you don’t laugh as much as you possibly can, then life really does become dull and scary."

Working with the younger actors underlined this a little. Lindsay’s activist spends most of his time uninfected and working with the kids. "I found myself very isolated even in the makeup trailer," he admits. "They were always joking about things I didn’t understand. The music they were playing, I hated. And I couldn’t hear any of them. They mumbled the whole time."

Dobson agrees: "I was never so aware of the generation gap as I was when I joined Generation Z. I have a lot of young friends and we go out for meals and drinks, but on set I felt like an old person. One of the boys was playing some music and I started digging it and he looked at me like I was mad."

But all the senior stars insist that they have never been tempted to reverse the clock with a little plastic surgery.

"I was talking to an agent yesterday who gets lots of requests from casting directors saying they don’t want anybody who’s had any work done," says Dobson with a little grin. "If they were playing creatures like Sue and I are playing they’d say, 'Oh, no, I’ve just had Botox all over and my chin done and my nose done and I don’t really want to cover it up.'"

"Anita," Lindsay jumps in. "I’ve just come back from LA. I worked there in the '80s, and I was catching up with some very old friends and I didn’t recognise any of them. I’m serious. I was completely shocked."

Johnston sighs. "I think it’s just sad, don’t you? I’m very proud of the three of us," she adds. "We’ve gone with the flow, got our wrinkles, and let me tell you we are growing old quite disgracefully."

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Generation Z is available to watch on Channel 4.

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