“The Walking Dead” Season 5 has become another ratings smash, even beating Sunday Night Football in key demos.
“That’s supposed to be the premiere game of the week and ‘The Walking Dead’ is beating it. It’s a little bit of justice for me just because I kind of rode the bench when I played football, so I’m kind of like, ‘Yeah! In your face, football,'” Josh McDermitt, who plays Dr. Eugene Porter on the AMC zombie apocalypse drama, said, throwing in a little humor when he stopped by Access Hollywood earlier this week.
On set though, Josh said the cast of the hit series just gets down to the business of making their killer show.
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“Honestly, we don’t really talk about it that much,” he told Access of the weekly ratings news.
“We think it’s great and we’ll get an e-mail from one of our executive producers saying, ‘Oh my gosh, you guys, you’re shattering records!’ and we’re like, ‘Wow this is awesome,’ but like you said, we have so much work to do, it’s the last thing on our mind,” he continued. “We’re not doing it for the ratings, we’re not doing it to try and boost the visibility of the show… That’s awesome, we love it, but really we don’t pay attention to it. If we did, the show would suck.”
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Asked if he’s gained any additional insight as to why so many millions are tuning in on Sunday nights at 9 PM ET/PT, now that he’s in his second season on the show as Eugene, Josh said the cast just appreciates that they’ve struck gold.
“We do talk about kind of why it’s a popular show, and I don’t think anyone knows. We all have theories, but at the end of the day I think we just got lucky,” he told Access. “We’re putting together a show that people love. It’s got the human element to it. It’s not just a show about zombies. I was a huge fan of the show, but I’m not a fan of the horror genre, and zombies especially, because I get scared, but I watched this show because it wasn’t about zombies, it was about survival and the biggest threat is your fellow human. So there’s that.
“It’s a very emotional show. It’s very intense. It’s just very real. It feels like it could happen, and I think that’s what people kind of identify with, not just people who love the zombie genre, but just people who don’t are gravitating towards the show,” Josh continued.
Based on this week’s preview clips for “TWD,” Eugene, Sgt. Abraham Ford (Michael Cudlitz), Rosita (Christian Serratos), Glenn (Steven Yeun), Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Tara (Alanna Masterson) are gravitating in the direction of Washington, D.C. in this Sunday’s episode.
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But, on the bus the gang picked up at Father Gabriel’s church, Glenn has some other business to address with Eugene – why he has a mullet.
“Well, first things first, I was pretty upset when I read that in the script that Glenn is not respecting the mullet and I quickly went to the writers and asked them to change that,” Josh joked. “But I think we’ll see more about the mullet. I love that it’s kind of becoming a centerpiece, not just [in] the Twitterverse, but also within ‘The Walking Dead’ universe, just like, we’re talking about it, we’re addressing it because it is this interesting thing: this scientist comes out and he’s wearing a mullet. It’s like, ‘Why do you have a mullet?'”
Josh hinted that in this Sunday night’s episode, fans will get to know Eugene a lot more.
“We get to find out more about the scientific background that Eugene has,” Josh teased.
Eugene has been a quiet, but influential character in the episodes he has appeared in on the show, and in recent weeks, he has been letting the members of Rick’s group in on pieces of his cure plans. But not all of them.
“The reason he kind of told Sasha and the rest of the group within the train car [in the Season 5 premiere] — it’s like he needed that protection at that moment and he still said, ‘The cure’s gonna die with me,’ but he did give them a little bit of information so that they could get on board and help save him, but I also think in this world, you really can’t trust anybody. But the longer he’s with Glenn and Tara and Maggie, along with Abraham and Rosita, he’s able to trust them more and I think we are gonna learn a little bit more about where Eugene is coming from with this cure,” Josh said.
“The Walking Dead” airs Sundays at 9 PM ET/PT on AMC.
— Jolie Lash
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