Glenn, Michonne, Tyreese and Rick from ‘The Walking Dead’ (AMC)
“The Walking Dead” delivered several unexpected surprises and a huge shock when it returned on Sunday night.
(Spoiler alert! This interview contains details from Sunday’s mid-season return of “The Walking Dead,” so if you haven’t watched, bookmark this link to come back to it later.)
In Sunday’s return of the AMC drama, in an episode called “What Happened and What’s Going On,” Rick Grimes’ group of survivors got a little smaller, and we saw the return of several faces from the past.
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As Tyreese (Chad L. Coleman) battled to live, he had hallucinations, which allowed the show to bring back many faces from the past – children Lizzie and Mika, Beth Greene, Bob Stookey and two people that caused Tyreese pain and grief – gum-chewing Terminan Martin and David Morrissey’s The Governor. Access Hollywood turned to Executive Producer Gale Anne Hurd to find out how the show made those surprise return cameos happen. She also told us about saying goodbye to Chad.
Access: So many amazing cameos were in this episode. I have to start off by asking how that happened. Whose idea were they and how hard was it to make them happen?
Gale Anne Hurd: It was Scott Gimple’s — our showrunner’s idea. And I have to say, when I first read the outline, I said, ‘Wow. How likely is it that all of these people that you’ve written are going to be available?’ And then, I think when the draft came out, in addition to the characters who were in it from the beginning, he added The Governor. And that was difficult. He was working. We had to bring him over from the UK, and we were completely freaked out that it would leak — that if David Morrissey was in town, ‘What’s going on? Are we doing something about his brother?’ you know, ‘What’s the deal? Does he have a twin?’ And there were a couple of people who noticed that he was in town, and he basically just said, ‘No, I’m just in town for something else, and I’m getting together with my friends.’
Executive Producer Gale Anne Hurd and Andrew Lincoln on the set of ‘The Walking Dead’ Season 5 (AMC)
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Access: Clever. So did you guys get to do anything fun behind the scenes just to celebrate everybody being back together?
Gale: It was a couple of intense days of shooting and we tend to shoot late. I think there were probably some informal get-togethers, but we have such a good time on set that it really felt – and I was on set during those days – it really felt like one of those fantastic reunions where, unlike a family reunion where there’s that weird cousin you want to avoid, this is, ‘I never want this reunion to be over.’
Access: Were they all there at the same time?
Gale: Everyone was on set. … They showed up at different times in the hallucination, but there was considerable overlap.
Access: So the radio voice in the episode – I wanted to ask – is that Andrew Lincoln, his voice?
Gale: Yes.
Access: Whose idea was it to—
Gale: But it wasn’t obviously Rick’s voice (laughs).
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Access: No, it was Andrew Lincoln’s lovely British accent! But whose idea was that to use his voice?
Gale: That was also Scott’s.
Access: What did Andrew think of that?
Gale: I think, at the time, it was really just, you know, ‘We’ll just do this. We’ll see how it goes. We’ll see if it’s too distracting. We certainly don’t want anyone beforehand to notice because then, they’ll get pulled out of it.’ But he just recorded it on set, and then we had to make the decision whether to keep it or not.
Access: I didn’t notice it until the last radio transmission [that Tyreese heard]. … It took me until that point.
Gale: You are a superfan!
Access: What was the significance of the [radio announcements] we heard?
Gale: It operated to me on a number of levels, which is it gave you a clue that these were clearly hallucinations, that these were messages from the other side, because the radio is almost like that as well. And it’s an alternate universe. It’s not the here and now.
Access: I have to ask about the death of Tyreese — does it mean that you can’t be sort of the sweet, sensitive soul that he is? That you can’t have that big of a heart in this world?
Gale: The one-two punch of Beth and Tyreese really brings home what Rick’s character was already beginning to understand, which is that you have to be willing to be ruthless. At the same time, you don’t have to become a villain. It’s walking that very fine line.
Access: Let me just ask you about saying goodbye to Chad and how that went. He’s a sweet man.
Gale: He’s an absolute sweetheart. He’s one of the people probably, on the show, that I have become closest to and we were really lucky because we were able to go to promote the series in Rio de Janeiro earlier — last fall — and we got to spend time together there. … When you’re shooting… you talk to someone a little bit on set, maybe you’ll have dinner, but we were [in Rio] for three days and I really felt that that’s a bond that’s never going to be broken. … People always ask, because someone’s tenure on the show could be very short, does that keep people rather sheltered and closed off? And the truth is, not with this cast. Everybody who’s joined the cast has not only been welcomed with open arms, but has embraced their fellow cast members. It’s something I have never witnessed before in my 37 years in the business.
“The Walking Dead” continues Sundays at 9 PM ET/PT on AMC.
— Jolie Lash
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