Starr breaks out of comedy mold in 'Dead Snow' sequel

With a career so far chock full of comedy, Martin Starr needed some horror in his life, and he had to go all the way to Iceland to find it.

For American audiences, the Silicon Valley regular is pretty much the only familiar face among the cast of Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead (in theaters Friday), the sequel to the zombie thriller where undead Colonel Herzog and his bunch of Nazi soldiers sought out legendary gold in the Norwegian mountains and took out anybody who was in their way.

Starr plays Daniel, the leader of a group of American doomsday preppers known as the Zombie Patrol who are called in when the undead marches on a small town, tanks and zombified locals in tow.

It was a no-brainer for the actor because not only was it trying something completely new for himself, Starr says, but also, "how could I turn down killing Nazis? All my Jewish friends would hate me for the rest of eternity for it."

Mostly filmed outside Reykjavík, the Dead Snow sequel has a dark comedy vibe along the lines of the original Evil Dead and Shaun of the Dead, but his character gave Starr a chance to do stunt work and be an action hero.

One of Starr's key scenes has him taking out zombies with a pair of hammers, and then throwing one hammer at an undead Nazi, stepping on his stomach and then catching it after it shoots back up.

"On days off, you would just go in and start prepping your stunts and getting in appropriate shape and practicing," Starr, 32, says. "I've had to change the way my body looked but not specific to training for a stunt, and that I would love to do again."

He did dodge one major bullet, though. Due to all the zombie killing, most of the characters had to have blood on them somewhere, but as a joke, Daniel would be the only one in the group who never had any get on him.

Good thing, too, because Starr was weirded out every morning when the movie's main star Vegar Hoel would get sprayed down every morning with fake blood and then casually wipe it off when they were done filming.

"It gave me anxiety seeing him with dried blood on his face for 14 hours a day," Starr says. "Maybe I'm a hygienic freak or something."

The terror didn't bother local children in the small Icelandic town where they did the film's climactic battle.

"There were 200 zombies running around," Starr recalls, "and these little kids in the neighborhood were so fearless and curious. They wanted to get hugs from the zombies. It was a total cultural difference.

"I feel like in the United States, parents would shield themselves from something like this. But there was a huge gang of them and the girls were as into it as the guys. It was a fun environment."

Starr admits that the way he's pushed his own career trajectory — with funny roles in Freaks and Geeks, Party Down, Superbad and Knocked Up — wasn't exactly conducive to someone hiring him for a horror movie.

Yet the past three years has seen him make conscious decisions to put himself out there, even with things that might scare him, "for fear of never doing them and not challenging myself and just wanting to expand my creative vocabulary," says the actor.

While the comedy isn't going away — later this month Starr begins filming the second season of HBO's Silicon Valley, in which he plays obnoxious nerd Gilfoyle — the actor did the thriller Shut In this past summer where he stars as "a crazy person like Dwight Yoakam in Panic Room" and it follows on the heels of his darker turn in the recent Veronica Mars movie.

He's also pushing himself to write more and continue performing with the indie band Common Rotation.

"While it's something that maybe no one will ever get on board with, it drives me to do certain things in my life and helps me to express myself," Starr says. "It helps me appreciate all aspects of my available creative assets."