An actor explains what it's really like to play a dead body

A few nights later he had a dream that Lennie Briscoe, the character from "Law & Order" who always looked down at the corpse of the victim and said something pithy, spoke to him. He woke his wife up and said, "I can be a dead body!"

"What really scared me at first was that she used to come up with different ways to kill me three times a week," Lamb says. "You start to think, well she’s liking this just a little too much."

After the second day, it got about 200 hits. Six weeks later, Lamb was on the front page of the New York Times. "Once it hit the front page, it just went nuts," Lamb says.

"Good Morning America" and "CBS Early Morning" wanted Lamb on their shows first, but since the "Today" show promised to get him a television gig, Lamb agreed to the show’s request.

He’s since done 400 interviews and appeared on countless shows and news sites. He’s also attended horror conventions, autograph shows, and the 2006 Oscars. His picture is even up on the wall at Carnegie Deli in NYC.

In early 2006, characters Val and Vic finally got married, and Lamb played an uncle who died because he — like all of the fans — had waited so long for the wedding.

When Lamb went on MSNBC with Rita Cosby and Roger Marino, the producer of the horror film "Stiffs" called in to the show and offered him a role in the film. Lamb gladly accepted.

He spent 10 hours on the set of "Stiffs" for his four seconds of screen time. "It's really neat, but it’s nothing like what everyone thinks it is," Lamb says. "It’s not very glamorous."

That means spending more than an hour in makeup. The corpse makeup artists use a makeup pallet filled with different shades of gray and tan that is informally called "The Wheel of Death."

This is especially true if the scene takes place in a rainstorm. Lamb's best tips are to lay still, relax, slow your breathing down, close your eyes almost all the way, and go to a happy place. "I just try to lay as still as I can and look as dead as I can," Lamb says.

In his death scene, Paxton gets shot, says, "Brother don’t let him get you," and dies with his eyes open. Kurt Russell, playing Wyatt Earp, "grabs him, shakes him, slaps the piss out of him, grabs him by his ears, throws him, does everything to him but mug him, and he never blinks or anything," Lamb says. "I wish I could do that."

The crew was shooting on a beach in Florida, and when the director called "Action!" Lamb realized he was laying in a pile of red ants that were "biting the crap" out of him.

When the director called "Cut!" Lamb ran into the water to wash the ants off.

After explaining his abrupt behavior the director asked, "Why didn't you say something?" And Lamb replied, "Because I wanted to be the best dead body you ever had.”

This is in addition to covering food and hotel costs. And the grand total revenue from the ads off his website? "About $30 bucks," Lamb says. "I don’t know how to use them."

The film, about a demonic turkey that goes on a revenge killing spree, was called "cheerily awful" by The Boston Globe, but the film became a cult classic on college campuses when it was released on Netflix a few years ago.

Despite a back surgery that slowed him down a few years ago, "America’s Got Talent" called him up a few weeks ago and asked if he could play dead and tell "dead guy" jokes during a 90-second comedic sketch.

But he offers one plausible explanation: "It's a lighter way to view something that we're all going to have to go through anyway. Death is not a lot of fun, but it's going to happen to everybody, so why not get a giggle out of it?"

But Lamb says he is still incredibly thankful that he's got at least one movie credit under his belt, which was his original goal.

"I was 47 before I finally got to do what I wanted to do," Lamb says.

"I’m like a 6-foot, 230-pound Cinderella," he says. "It’s hilarious, and it’s so much fun."