'I'm the 6ft 8in Alpha in 28 Years Later that's haunting your dreams'
'Terrify me.' That was the instruction given to Chi Lewis-Parry by director Danny Boyle in his 28 Years Later audition.
'I didn't really understand what that meant. Like, how do you want me to go about this?' Lewis-Parry laughs. 'But I'm guessing I terrified him good enough!'
The actor and MMA fighter didn't know the movie he was reading for initially, it was just 'Untitled Danny Boyle project'. But as he says of the name attached: 'It didn't matter what it was. I could have played a bin bag, and I'd have been happy.'
* Spoilers ahead for 28 Years Later!*
Lewis-Parry gets rather more than that as he portrays the 'king of the Alphas', Samson, in 28 Years Later – the most feared, and genuinely nightmare-inducing, of the newly evolved strain of the Infected.
Over 20 years since Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland introduced their take on the zombie horror flick to the world with 28 Days Later in 2002, they're back with their hotly anticipated follow up, which was released in cinemas on Thursday.
It's not a sequel, but – like the less well-received 28 Weeks Later in 2007, which Boyle and Garland only executive-produced – it's set in the same post-apocalyptic world, ravaged by the blood-born Rage Virus that turned humans into the flesh-eating Infected.
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But, after 28 years and with mainland Britain now under quarantine, new variants have emerged, and the most fearsome of all is the massive Beserker or Alpha. Not only are they bigger, stronger and meaner, but they display intelligence – and also the truly hideous habit of 'despining' their victims.
Another variant is the Slow Low, a blubbery and bald creature that crawls on the ground slurping up worms.
'I saw it as you became what you are in your society,' Lewis-Parry tells Metro of the Infected's evolution.
'So if you are an alpha in your everyday life, then you are an Alpha as the infected. The traits and characteristics of the Infected didn't necessarily change from when they were human, but they are fuelled by rage, so control is lost.'
We see one Alpha chase father and son Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Spike (Alfie Williams) down the causeway to their human haven on Holy Island after an educational hunting trip.
But Samson, who is so named by the iodine-stained and eccentric Dr Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), gets a little more character development.
After we see him take out a patrol of NATO soldiers – ripping one man's skull and spine out and then using it to beat another to death – he announces his arrival in an abandoned train carriage in similar fashion after Isla (Jodie Comer) helps a pregnant Infected give birth.
Samson is shown to be more in control of his Rage than normal, aware of his surroundings and clocking the Infected after seeing her feet, leading to an interaction that informed the rest of that claustrophobic encounter between him, Spike and Isla.
'I remember when we shot that, it wasn't on the page. That was something we came up with. Danny just said, 'I want to include something here that shows he is conscious, what do you think?''
'That's his creative genius is he lets you talk about things because we all inspire each other. There's no ego involved – and he literally just made it up on the day, based off our conversation.'
Spike and Isla are then stunned to see Dr Kelson sedate Samson rather than kill him – something which would take as many as 12 precious arrows anyway in a society without guns.
Suddenly, he's not just a scary killing machine – especially as Kelson reveals he has spent 13 years tending to the dead among both humans and the Infected alike, building his towering 'memento mori' of their skulls and bones.
'A lot of people would be put off by a person like Dr Kelson, and Jamie even says that he's gone mad, but he's a complicated man, in a very dire situation, and he's also very lonely,' suggests Lewis-Parry, who also played Phoebus in Gladiator II.
And as to their characters' unexpected 'sweet relationship', he adds: 'I think in Samson he sees something that is probably more attractive than the humanity that's left, because this is something that's just operating off instincts, not hatred or a dislike for people, it is just existing. I think there's a nice sort of innocence to it.'
That's one way of describing the huge naked zombie with wild hair and a long beard, red eyes and a thirst for blood – oh, and near-unstoppable strength.
And yes, because everyone will be wondering – the Infected wear prosthetic genitals for both modesty and also legal reasons, due to working with the then 12-year-old Williams (or as Lewis-Parry confirms of the behind-the-scenes processes for the appearance of nudity: 'I never at any point thought I was going to be walking around in the nip'.)
But it's not just how Lewis-Parry looks – being 6 ft 8in barefoot helps with the intimidation – but how he moves as an Alpha too that gives him such impact on screen.
There's a very neat story behind the first person he explored Samson's physicality with, actor and the film's movement coach, Toby Sedgwick.
Sedgwick actually played the Infected priest who Cillian Murphy's confused courier Jim interacts with in 2002's 28 Days Later, when he's trying to work out why he's woken up from a coma to find London abandoned. It was also him who invented the iconic stilted but petrifyingly fast run of the Infected.
But Lewis-Parry knew he needed to do something different as he saw his Alpha having 'more control over the state that the infection puts him in, so that actually makes him more dangerous'.
'I felt like it looked like he was trying too hard, and I didn't want him to be trying anything – everything he did was just incidental. So I started to look at legendary movement, people like Andy Serkis, who is, in my opinion, the greatest all time. I looked at how he moved.'
Although he couldn't directly copy Serkis due to – in his words – 'how vastly different our sizes are', he knew it was all about intention.
'What was his intention when he was moving, when he was crawling, when he was standing or when he was breathing?' shares Lewis-Parry, who was also inspired by creatures in 1980s and 90s horror movies like Predator and the Wolf Man.
'[Samson's] very predatory, but he's not hiding the fact that he's coming after you. He's not trying to sneak up on you or conceal his presence. He's just like, I'm running through this wall, and if you're on the other side of it… The motive I gave him was that nothing will stop me.'
And it appears that nothing has yet, as – although Lewis-Parry is very careful about giving anything away regarding next year's sequel, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple , which was shot back to back – Samson is still alive and kicking as a zombie can get at the end of this year's film. More Trending
'What can I tease? There's a part two,' he smiles before hesitating as he picks his next words carefully. 'It's different, it's amazing.'
And that's all I'm getting.
28 Years Later is in cinemas now. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple will be released on January 16, 2026.
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