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What Eads Heard While In The Box: 'Your Mom's Watching You Die'

By Christian
May 20, 2005 - 9:53 AM

See Also: 'Grave Danger' Episode Guide

When the lid was first shut on George Eads while filming Nick Stokes' coffin scenes in "Grave Danger," the actor didn't expect to be able to hear from the crew again until after his scene was done. It's not hard to imagine his shock when he suddenly heard Quentin Tarantino's voice coming through the ventilation tube.

"I didn't know he was going to use it as a way to communicate with me," Eads said on last night's edition of the Entertainment Tonight. "Once, they were shooting everybody running around outside the coffin and I hear this, 'Hey Nick, it is Quentin.' It was like the voice of God. I was, 'Man, you are freaking me out, don't do that.' To say that it was intimate with him is putting it lightly. He was all up in my grill. That is the way I like to work."

Tarantino used the tube to get Eads to let his imagination go and really place himself in the mental state of his character. "[Tarantino said,] 'Your mom's watching. Your mom's watching you die.' And then he'd start singing 'Hush little baby, don't you…' I mean the whole crew is going, 'whoa.' I think it had the right effect, it brought out some pretty real emotions."

Even if Eads was pleased with the performance Tarantino was able to elicit from him, the actor also admitted that while filming the finale, he probably spent a bit more time thinking about matters of life and death than he'd ordinarily want to. "Mentally mentally for a few days, I was in that box contemplating my death, which is something I stay away from," he said. "Quentin had me contemplating it hourly for three days. We really went down a pretty deep wormhole with the whole death thing and that was pretty strenuous after a while."

But during the several weeks it took to shoot "Grave Danger," Eads and Tarantino also went through some lighter moments. The actor recalled how "one scene, [Tarantino] wasn't really fired up about, so during lunch, he rewrote the entire thing with a pencil, and brought it to me and [Gary Dourdan (Warrick Brown), and we did it ten minutes later." The actor began to laugh, as he confessed to interviewer Kevin Frazier that Tarantino's "spelling was just atrocious."

For more thoughts from Eads on what it was like being in the coffin, and how he enjoyed working with Tarantino, check out the full Entertainment Tonight interview as it aired on American television yesterday. Thanks go out to Elyse's for some of the above quotes!

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