Ghostbusters: Afterlife director discusses Bob Gunton’s involvement with the film

If you’re still trying to avoid Ghostbusters: Afterlife SPOILERS, look away!

If you’re not avoiding spoilers, or if you’ve already seen the movie, then you know that original Ghostbuster Egon Spengler returns in the new film, despite the fact that actor Harold Ramis passed away in 2014. In a new interview with The Wrap, director Jason Reitman discusses how the return of Egon was accomplished – and how character actor Bob Gunton, who may be best known for playing Warden Samuel Norton in The Shawshank Redemption, was involved in this mission to bring Egon back to the screen!

Reitman said he knew he needed to make Ghostbusters: Afterlife once he envisioned the ending, which sees a ghostly Egon being reunited with his fellow Ghostbusters as well as his family members. So while visual effects house MPC started figuring out how to digitally create an older, ghostly Egon, Gunton was cast to be Egon’s stand-in on set. Reitman explained,

He’s this brilliant actor who came and performed the scene with the original guys, and he had to do the selfless thing of agreeing to be a part of a movie that you would never see him in.” (Gunton also appears in the movie’s cold open, which establishes Egon’s demise and his existence as a shut-in in the middle of nowhere Oklahoma.)

MPC started by creating a photoreal younger Egon that they edited into footage from the original Ghostbusters (watch that movie HERE) to prove they could handle the job. Then they aged the character up, and MPC’s Dan Zelcs said they used the footage featuring Gunton as a start.

From the neck down, it’s him,” Zelcs said. They also utilized a scan of Gunton, looking at the facial muscles, the wrinkles and folds, the “tics and squints” that made his skin believable.

The return of Egon was done with the approval of Ramis’s family, who were the first people to read the script after Reitman’s father (producer Ivan Reitman, who directed the first two movies.) The younger Reitman said,

They’ve been a part of this process the whole way. They read the script, they came to set, they came to the editing room, they reviewed the final version of the movie. I was never going to make this movie without them. The extraordinary experience has been getting to know them better, getting to know these people that have known since I was a kid, even better as they entrusted me with these scenes.” Reitman credits Gunton’s performance, and the reactions of the rest of the actors. “I don’t know what it’s like to perform a scene where you are simultaneously saying goodbye to a character, but saying goodbye to someone you also loved in real life.”

The Wrap’s article on the process is quite interesting, so if you want to hear more about the recreation of Egon, click over there. And if you want to see the action figure that was made with the image of the ghostly Egon, you can see that HERE.

Written by Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan, Ghostbusters: Afterlife stars Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, and Mckenna Grace as

a family with single mom Callie and her two kids, Trevor and Phoebe, who move into a beaten-down farmhouse in Oklahoma only to discover that there’s something strange in the neighborhood. Unexplained quakes shake the town. There’s an old mine nearby that bears the name of Ivo Shandor, who built the Manhattan high-rise in the 1984 film that channeled the forces of evil.

Paul Rudd plays “a local teacher who’s been documenting the unexplained phenomena, befriending Callie and her kids, and helping make the connection between the current weirdness and the events of three decades before”. Also in the cast are Bokeem Woodbine, Tracy Letts, Oliver Cooper, and an uncredited Olivia Wilde, with Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Sigourney Weaver, and Annie Potts reprising their roles from the first two films. (Watch Ghostbusters II HERE.)

Ivan Reitman produced Ghostbusters: Afterlife, with Aykroyd serving as executive producer alongside Jason Blumenfeld, Michael Beugg, Aaron L. Gilbert, Jason Cloth, and Kenan.

Our own Chris Bumbray gave Ghostbusters: Afterlife an 8/10 review you can read at THIS LINK.