Into the Storm‘s Nathan Kress’ 5 tips to survive a zombie apocalypse

iCarly star Nathan Kress plays a storm chaser in the new thriller Into the Storm that’s guaranteed to blow your Crocs off. We sat down with Kress to find out what it was like to act while being chased by a CGI tornado. Turns out, it’s a lot more dangerous than you might think!

While Into the Storm uses many special effects like CGI to create a realistic-looking storm on film, many of the actors had to endure real explosions, falling trees and actual fireballs. Kress claims the fear you see in his eyes is real as he had to dodge large items flying at his face.

iCarly heads to Late Night with Jimmy Fallon >>

We asked Kress about his most frightening moment from the shoot.

“It’s the scene where we’re driving along near a car dealership, and four or five tornadoes are surrounding us. There’s one sequence where we get out of the weather van and out of the Titus, our little tank vehicle, and we run across this vast expanse into a shelter off in the distance and all this stuff happens to us along the way.

“We got to the point where we got all the interstitial shots taken care of, all the angles were covered. And they said, ‘All right, this is the one, we’re going to do everything for real, all in one take.’ There was a tree rigged with explosives that would blow up and fall down in front of us, there was a big fireball and fire tornado that would show up, we had to vault this ditch-thing that had a hundred-mile-an-hour fan blowing off to the side of us, so we were getting blown over and slipping around, and we had to get up to the shelter.

Ricky Gervais chases sex and zombies with David Brent in Life on the Road >>

“If any of us messed up it would have completely blown the take so it was a little bit terrifying because if they weren’t so safe on set, if we didn’t have such a great stunt crew, some of us could have died. Fortunately, it was very controlled, and it went well.”

Cast of Dolphin Tale 2: “Don’t compare us to SeaWorld” >>

There’s only one scene in the film where Kress had a stunt double. It’s the scene where a tree comes through the window at the school.

“Because the window was rigged with explosives, they didn’t know exactly what would happen, so they went ahead and gave me a stunt double on that one just in case the boom was bigger than they thought or the tree messed up. The guy was actually taller than me and had a different shape, so if you look close, you can tell it isn’t me.”

We wanted to know from Kress if he picked up any survival tips we could use if there were a natural disaster or perhaps even a zombie apocalypse.

“The problem with this movie is that we do the exact opposite of everything that you’re supposed to do.”

Daniel Radcliffe opens up about his love life >>

He said for both a natural disaster and zombie apocalypse, you’d want to hunker down and find a safe zone. “With a tornado, it’s over pretty quick. But for a zombie apocalypse, you have to think long-term. You have to stockpile your resources. You’d want to be up high, like at the top of a skyscraper so if there was a breach in your perimeter, they couldn’t get to you.”

Good advice, Nathan! Watch our video to find out why he thought he was going to be fired from the film.

Into the Storm is currently in theaters.