The wait is almost over! Everyone’s returning to Seabrook for Zombies 3, which debuts exclusively on Disney+ on July 15. Zed and Addison have made it to senior year, and things are better than ever. However, their lives are turned upside down when Aliens arrive and decide to stick around. The film welcomes Matt Cornett, Terry Hu, and Kyra Tantao to the world of Zombies 3.
HollywoodLife got the chance to speak EXCLUSIVELY with the cast about all things Zombies 3. Matt stars as A-spen, one of the aliens. The role is a departure from EJ in High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. Matt even called the role of A-lan a “super fun challenge” for him.
“Obviously, I love playing EJ. He’s a second part of me now, but it was so much fun trying to figure out A-lan and figure out this alien world and doing it with these two [Terry and Kyra],” Matt told HollywoodLife. “Before we started filming the movie, when we were all in quarantine, we all got on a FaceTime call or a Zoom call, one of the two, I don’t remember. We sat down and we just kind of talked about, okay, how are we going to create these aliens? Because while we did have conversations with Paul, the director, we also had to within ourselves kind of figure out how are we going to play certain things? What are the specific moments? Where did we come from? What are our reasons behind so many different things? Because something about the aliens is they are very like-minded, and they’re all supposed to think alike and be perfectly in unison. Figuring that out was really hard, especially coming from playing EJ, who is just very similar to me, just a high school dude who is a sports guy and theater guy, and then going to playing an alien was very different.”
Terry plays A-spen, another one of the aliens. Terry is also making history as Disney’s first leading non-binary star. The actor opened up about how much this role means to them.
“I keep talking about how, on a personal level, I’m super grateful to be part of this,” Terry said. “It’s really exciting. I love the movie. I’m so excited for it. But some of the grandness of it doesn’t come until the fans start reaching out. I read the fan messages, and they’re like, ‘This means so much to me… Oh, my God, I could never have imagined this.’ And I’m like, wow, this is really big. It’s a huge honor, huge privilege. It feels really, really surreal. I really, really love that the movie doesn’t center around A-spen’s queer or non-binary identity. They just happen to be. It’s very kind of subtle, but I think in that way so powerful and so normalized. You get to just see them exist, and that is such a beautiful thing and to find joy and love and all that. So, I’m super, super excited, and very honored.”
The aliens don’t get the warmest reception at first when they arrive in Seabrook. The werewolves are understandably a little hesitant about trusting the Aliens. “He’s a little bit wary of the aliens,” Pearce Joza said about Wyatt. “I think the rest of the werewolves are as well. Chandler [Kinney] was talking earlier about how we don’t want them to steal our moonstone. That’s a very hot topic for us. We just want to make sure that we protect our pack, especially with this new threat coming in. Our pack is now bigger. We have the entirety of Seabrook as a part of our family now and we want to protect that.”
When it comes to the Zombies movies, the music has always been top-tier. Trevor Tordjman admitted that Zombies 3 starts “with a song that you’ve never seen on a Zombies franchise before. I can tease that it’s just generally much bigger, and there’s these crazy VFX. Even the style of song hasn’t existed in the Zombies franchise before, so that is definitely something to look forward to.”
Chandler revealed that she is a huge fan of the “Come On Out” musical number, which is the big werewolf number in Zombies 3. “It is epic. It has this really cool bass to it. It is so catchy. It gets stuck in my head all the time, and it’s definitely a song that when you hear it you want to get up and you want to dance. The dance number itself is huge,” Chandler told HollywoodLife.
Ariel Martin pointed out that the aliens, zombies, and werewolves all have “such distinct dancing styles. So like doing ‘Alien Invasion,’ for example, we almost had to adapt to the alien style of dance, which is more linear lines. We had to be very specific about even where our fingers would go. Whereas the werewolves are more used to these larger-than-life, over-the-top moves, and then zombies have their own way of dancing, there’s the cheerleading. Like Pearce was saying, the choreographers really brought that out from each of us and made these styles so specific and distinct.”