14 DAY TRIAL // A 56-year-old man has given up his day job as a computer engineer to fulfill his lifelong dream of becoming an actor, and he is now earning a living playing dead bodies in films and TV shows.
Chuck Lamb, from Ohio, quit his job in 2005 to pursue his bizarre hobby – playing dead – and has had around 25 roles in TV series and movies until now. According to Daily Mail, he earns up to $1,500 (€1.076) a day for playing corpses.
Mr. Lamb says it all started when he was watching an episode of police detective drama “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” with his wife Tonya.
“It started as a joke, we live in the mid-west and there aren’t many film opportunities,” Chuck said. “I just thought: ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to be on TV?’ How could we do that being nobodies. I had a dream that I was the dead body on Law & Order. I woke up and realized: you don’t need any talent to play dead!”
So, his wife created some elaborate scenes and made fake blood to set up gruesome scenarios in which Chuck played the victim. She took photos and videos of her husband being run over by a jeep, crushed under a garage door, electrocuted by a toaster and more, and posted them online on his website, called “Dead Body Guy.”
“She's the brains behind it, I'm just the big hunk of meat that lies around ‘getting slaughtered,’” Chuck admits.
The website proved very popular, with more than 50 million views shortly after its launch in 2005. After he appeared on popular shows like “The Late Show with David Letterman” and “Have I Got News for You,” Chuck was approached by different casting agents and got to play murder victims on TV.
He starred in 2007 thriller “Vacancy” alongside British actress Kate Beckinsale, and in the cult horror hit “Thankskilling,” the story of a demonic turkey that kills students.
“When I started doing this, I thought, ‘I really look like a dead guy. I’m pale, I’m bald, I have bags under my eyes – you could definitely pick me out as a zombie or a dead guy anywhere,” the man said.
However, Mr. Lamb says he realized that becoming an actor in a movie was not an easy thing to do. He recalls that once, it took the film crew eight hours to do a seven-second scene and he had been left waiting in all sorts of places.