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World War Z by Brad Pitt : Movies & TV

World War Z: Humanity on the Brink

Welcome to the official fan site for World War Z — the global blockbuster that brought a thrilling new take on the zombie apocalypse. This site is your ultimate destination for everything related to the film: from intense action scenes and behind-the-scenes footage to character profiles, storyline breakdowns, exclusive interviews, fan theories, and survival tips inspired by the movie. Whether you’re revisiting the chaos or discovering it for the first time, explore the world where humanity fights to survive against a fast-moving, global threat. Join the community, relive the tension, and prepare for what comes next.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is a 2006 zombie apocalyptic horror novel written by American author Max Brooks. The novel is broken into eight chapters: “Warnings”, “Blame”, “The Great Panic”, “Turning the Tide”, “Home Front USA”, “Around the World, and Above”, “Total War”, and “Good-Byes”, and features a collection of individual accounts told to and recorded by an agent of the United Nations Postwar Commission, following a devastating global conflict against a zombie plague. The personal accounts come from individuals from different walks of life and all over the world, including Antarctica and outer space. The “interviews” detail the experiences of the survivors of the crisis, as well as social, political, religious, economic, and environmental changes that have occurred as a result.

World War Z is a follow-up to Brooks’s fictional survival manual The Zombie Survival Guide (2003), but its tone is more serious. It was inspired by The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two (1984) by Studs Terkel, and by the zombie films of George A. Romero. Brooks used World War Z to comment on government ineptitude and U.S. isolationism, while also examining survivalism and uncertainty. The novel was a commercial hit and was praised by most critics.

Its 2007 audiobook version, performed by a full cast including Alan Alda, Mark Hamill, and John Turturro, won an Audie Award. A loosely based film adaptation, directed by Marc Forster and starring Brad Pitt, was released in 2013, and a video game of the same name, based on the 2013 film, was released in 2019 by Saber Interactive.

Cast

  • Max Brooks as the Interviewer, explicitly identified by name as Max Brooks in the audiobook, an agent of the United Nations Postwar Commission and implied to be the author of the Civilian Survival Guide.
  • Steve Park as Kwang Jingshu, a Chinese physician.
  • Frank Kamai as Nury Televadi, a smuggler and human trafficker.
  • Nathan Fillion as Stanley MacDonald*, a former soldier in the 3rd Battalion Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry.
  • Paul Sorvino as Fernando Oliveira*, a Brazilian former surgeon.
  • Adetokumboh M’Cormack as Jacob Nyathi*, a South African civilian who survived the first major public outbreak in Cape Town.
  • Carl Reiner as Jurgen Warmbrunn, a Mossad agent who helped write the Warmbrunn-Knight Report, the first formal document to recommend countermeasures against the undead.
  • Waleed Zuaiter as Saladin Kader, a former Palestinian refugee who moved to Israel just before the start of the Great Panic.
  • Jay O. Sanders as Bob Archer, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
  • Dennis Boutsikaris as Travis D’Ambrosia, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe and creator of the resource-to-kill ratio.
  • Martin Scorsese as Breckinridge “Breck” Scott*, the billionaire creator of Phalanx who fled to Vostok Station at the start of the Great Panic.
  • Simon Pegg as Grover Carlson*, the White House Chief of Staff for the unnamed President of the United States during the Great Denial.
  • Denise Crosby as Mary Jo Miller*, an American civilian who is the developer, chief architect, and first mayor of Troy, a town in Montana specifically designed to survive an attack by the undead.
  • Bruce Boxleitner as Gavin Blaire*, an American blimp pilot.
  • Ajay Naidu as Ajay Shah, an Indian former office manager who fled the undead by boarding a ship along the coast of Alang.
  • Nicki Clyne as Sharon*, a now-adult feral child.
  • Jeri Ryan as Maria Zhuganova*, a former soldier in the Russian army who has become a state broodmare.
  • Henry Rollins as T. Sean Collins, an American mercenary who was hired to protect a fortified mansion in Long Island full of celebrities during the Great Panic.
  • Maz Jobrani as Ahmed Farahnakian, an Iranian former pilot in the Iranian air force who accidentally helped spark the nuclear Iran–Pakistan War.
  • Mark Hamill as Todd Wainio, a former soldier in the United States Army.
  • Eamonn Walker as Paul Redeker, a controversial former intelligence consultant for the apartheid-era South African government who created the Redeker Plan. In the novel, he is initially referred to as Xolelwa Azania, with it being implied that Redeker suffered some kind of psychotic episode during the war and abandoned his previous identity.
  • Eamonn Walker as David Allen Forbes, an English artist who participated in the defense of Windsor Castle.
  • Jürgen Prochnow as Philip Adler, a former tank commander in the German Army.
  • David Ogden Stiers as Bohdan Taras Kondratiuk*, a former tank commander in the Ukrainian army.
  • Michelle Kholos Brooks as Jesika Hendricks, an American-Canadian woman who survived the first winter after the Great Panic when she and her parents fled north.
  • Kal Penn as Sardar Khan*, a former member of the Border Roads Organisation.
  • Alan Alda as Arthur Sinclair Junior, the Chair of the Federal Reserve and former Secretary of Strategic Resources.
  • Rob Reiner as “The Whacko”, the Vice President of the United States throughout most of the war, heavily implied to be Howard Dean.
  • Dean Edwards as Joe Muhammad, a paraplegic former member of a Neighborhood Security team, a volunteer quasi-military outfit intended to protect communities from zombie attacks during the war.
  • Frank Darabont as Roy Elliot*, a former Hollywood director who used his talents to direct military propaganda films during the war, inspiring hope to combat Asymptomatic Demise Syndrome.
  • Becky Ann Baker as Christina Eliopolis, a pre-war F-22 pilot in the United States Air Force who flew supply runs during the war.
  • Parminder Nagra as Barati Palshigar*, an Indian broadcaster for Radio Free Earth who provided information to isolated civilians and fought misinformation during the war.
  • Masi Oka as Kondo Tatsumi*, a former otaku who became a member of the Japan Self-Defense Forces Shield Society branch.
  • Frank Kamai as Tomonaga Ijiro, a hibakusha who was permanently blinded by the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, going on to survive in the wilderness of Hokkaidō during the war and become the founder of the Shield Society.
  • John Turturro as Seryosha Garcia Alvarez, a Cuban civilian.
  • Ric Young as Xu Zhicai*, a former crewmate of a Type 094 submarine who fought in the Second Chinese Civil War on the side of the victorious rebels.
  • Alfred Molina as Terry Knox*, the Australian former commander of the International Space Station throughout the war.
  • John McElroy as Ernesto Olguin, a Chilean naval attaché who attended the Honolulu Conference.
  • Common as Darnell Hackworth*, a former member of the U.S. Army K-9 Corps.
  • F. Murray Abraham as Sergei Ryzhkov*, an Eastern Orthodox priest and former military chaplain who inadvertently sparked the religious revolution that transformed Russia into a theonomy.
  • Brian Tee as Hyungchol Choi, the deputy director of the KCIA; and Michael Choi*, a diver in the United States Navy Deep Submergence Combat Corps.
  • René Auberjonois as Andre Renard*, a former soldier in the French Army who helped clear the Parisian catacombs of thousands of reanimated refugees.

* The Complete Edition