This is part II to our in depth look at AMC’s new original series, The Walking Dead. You can read Part I here.
The Walking Dead centers on a group of survivors who must band together in the wake of a zombie invasion. Andrew Lincoln, who plays Officer Rick Grimes, heads a talented and diverse ensemble cast. Sarah Wayne Callies plays his wife, Lori. Other cast members include Emma Bell and Laurie Holden, who play camp refugees and sisters Amy and Andrea, Jon Bernthal who plays Rick’s partner Shane, and others include Jeffrey DeMunn, Steven Yeun, Michael Rooker, and Lennie James.
In this second part of Buzz Focus’ deeper look at Walking Dead, Lincoln, Callies, Bell, Holden and Bernthal talked to fans at Comic-Con and the media about their characters and the material that would inspire the television show.
When approached with the roles, each actor took it upon themselves to get acquainted with Robert Kirkman’s comic and a few of them read everything they could get their hands on; a testament to the source material and how adaptable this would be to television.
“I’ve read all of them except for this last volume,” Bell said. “I’ve become a pretty big fan of it. They’re well-written and totally lend themselves to a television show. It’s so perfect for the screen.”
Callies had a slightly different experience, which started by reading the first graphic novel to get a sense of how it looks. “I bought it, between my first and second audition with Frank and got to the end of it and turned to my husband and asked him to watch the kid for the next half-hour so that I could drive to the comic store. I asked, ‘Could I clear this shelf off?’ and got relatively hooked pretty quickly.”
“I saw a lot that I wanted to be involved in. From the perspective of playing Lori, saw a lot that I wanted to talk to Frank about in terms of, softening this, how do we connect her sharp edges with something we haven’t seen in the comics into something with a real beating heart. The comic gave me a lot of food for thought, and food for fleshing things out a little more.”
Bernthal was sold more on Darabont’s script. “I didn’t know about the comic, I was completely uneducated. It was so rich, what Rick goes through in the pilot just blew me away. The dialogue is so descriptive. I’ve never read comics before. My experience with them is that they’re fodder for the imagination. There are these wonderfully suggestive pictures and captions, and then it’s up to you and your imagination to fill in the blanks.”
“I got a scene and you wouldn’t have known it was a zombie genre piece from what I read,” marveled Lincoln. “Then, I got the scripts and thought it was brilliant. It was like nothing I had ever read before.”
“Like Sarah said, I went out to the comic store and started reading and couldn’t believe it. It was the most extraordinary world and characters I had ever read. Every time we go to work it feels like cinematic firsts involving some strange shit. For that reason alone it’s brilliant. It puts you in a different place.”
Holden added that there are some deviations because you don’t want to see an exact panel-for-panel retelling of the graphic novel because you’ve been there, done that. “They have some creative liberties, case in point; this little munchkin (Amy) is still alive. Just because you die in a comic book doesn’t mean you’re gonna die on the show, OR it might not happen until season two, three, or ten.”
Bell was given creative leeway since there wasn’t much established about Amy in the comic. “I knew the fundamentals.” Bell said. “I knew we were sisters, our parents probably didn’t make it, we were on a road trip, we got taken in by Dale and that’s all I pretty much knew about her. I got to build on what I thought worked like how well we (Amy and Andrea) bond with each other.”
“I had a lot of creative license too,” Holden said in retort. “How people know Andrea in the comic is not how she is now. In the comic book Andrea looks all cute hanging with her sister, and is like ‘Look, I can shoot a gun!’ It’s happy and light, when you know Andrea is actually this warrior.”
“But we’re not to the warrior now. There’s an opportunity to explore the love between the sisters and some of Andrea’s softer side. She’s got a lot of toughness to her, she’s a strong entity, but I was given a lot of creative latitude to make a full person. She was happier in the beginning, but there wasn’t a lot of it. Trust me, I’m not a happy camper, and Andrea’s very complicated.”
“She has a sense of humor. She has vulnerability, she’s still tough, but you’re not going to see me in fatigues with a ponytail and strapping a gun in the first six episodes because you need a place to go to.”
Bell then noted how slow time passes on Walking Dead. “It’s three or four days at camp is the entire first season. Scheduling wise, we’ve been comparing it like 24 where a lot of things happen but not a lot of time’s passed.”
The comics obviously had an effect and something that’s always struck me as interesting is to see how comics can be a bit of a revelation to those who have never read them prior. The fundamental reasoning for Comic-Con, why people love their comics so much is that it’s the one of the few areas of entertainment that’s not limited by how big or small the potential audience is. The Walking Dead is one of two independent comics that made a big splash at Comic-Con this year, Scott Pilgrim being the other. As actors, being given this rare chance to take these beloved characters to a new medium is not taken lightly.
“The opportunity to do something utterly new is so rare, especially in television right now.” Callies said. “The economy’s bad, it’s a fear-driven industry and there’s a lot of reproduction and doing what works, which is fine as a viewer, I love watching that stuff. As an actor to do something that feels like we could end up flat on our faces in the mud or at the top of a mountain, that kind of risk is exciting!”
“You might as well put that towards something that’s a real sense of a new collaborative creation. I think that’s why so many talented and exciting artists are pitching in for it.”
Lincoln said, “I just want to make it as real and truthful as the script plays. It’s a difficult one because you have a responsibility to a fan base, which everyone wants to appease. All I do is turn up and do the most truthful thing I can do in that scene and the rest is not my responsibility.”
“I don’t think the fans just want us to do the comic,” Callies chimed. “This fan base strikes me as intelligent and really engaged with the story. It’s not mindless. It requires so much of them. I can only imagine they want us to fully invest, and even if that means some of the corners and edges are a little bit different than how they started out, if they’re fully inhabited and real, that’s probably our best service we can give them.
“Part of the reason why the books have the following they do is because they resonate so much with people. There’s a zeitgeist of an apocalyptic feeling with nuclear weapons are being built again all over the world and the oil spill. I feel there’s a sense in our consciousness and culture that we sometimes feel like things are walking out at us in the night, tearing at us limb-from-limb. In that sense, we as members of the culture, we have that awareness.”
“That’s part of what Kirkman’s tapped into. None of us feel super-safe right now. To use entertainment to play some of that out and explore that in a safe enough way where you can close the comic book or turn off the television at the end of it, that’s what’s so interesting about the story.”
With a few episodes under their belt, I asked Holden and Bell if they preferred scenes developing their characters since they were given so much flexibility in their roles or the unique opportunity to do such bizarre and horrific action scenes.
“We have a lot of great parts around us,” Holden said about her fellow cast members. “Whenever they write wonderful scenes where we can interact with other characters you see just a little bit of humanity and somebody opens up their heart; those are the moments I look forward to.”
Bell agreed, but added, “Because we’re at camp, there’s real bonding between people, so when you shoot those big action sequences, when we’re being attacked, it’s pretty surreal to look around and see people crying or freaked out or holding people that have been bitten. You think, ‘Oh my gosh, these are my people!’ We must be doing something right in the other scenes to feel this connected to each other.”
The hook for each actor as it pertained to his or her individual character varied. Not only is this series unique, but also the characters are rich and full of life and intrigue. Each is portraying a complex character in this special circumstance and provides a different dynamic.
“I feel that is the key to Shane is friendship,” said Bernthal. “He cares about this family and puts their safety above his. There’s the desire to be a good friend and that sets you on a specific path.”
For Lincoln, The Walking Dead is about family. “It’s a love story, it’s a man searching for his family initially and protecting that. He’s an unlikely hero. There’s a quote when I think of Rick. ‘A hero’s a man who’s done all he can.’ And everything costs this man. He’s not an archetypal hero. There’s nothing more gratifying playing someone who changes through time.”
And Callies? “What scares me about Lori, is how dark her motherhood gets. I’ve got a kid and know a lot of people who have kids, and motherhood isn’t all, ‘Oh I’ve got this kid and it’s precious and beautiful!’ It’s dark, it’s ugly and it’s scary. Taking responsibility for another life, which you cannot protect scares the living daylights out of me. That’s both what scares me and intrigues me about the role of Lori.”
When asked about the possibility of working on a show that may have no foreseeable end, Lincoln stammered at the possibility because it’s too early to look down that far but said, “We’re still in the middle of shooting, but it’s one of the most exciting jobs I’ve ever been involved in. I don’t want it to finish.”
“Like Sarah said, it’s physically and emotionally brutalizing. It feels like a real workout, in the best possible way that every actor dreams for these kinds of roles. To think it could go as ongoing as the comic–it feels like we’re just scratching the surface. If it goes the way we’re hoping it to go, then yeah, LONG LIVE THE WALKING DEAD!”
