Norman Reedus joined producers Scott M. Gimble, Greg Nicotera, and David Zobel for a press conference at New York Comic Con Friday evening to discuss The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon as well as his early career.
”There’s dialogue introduced coming out of the Chunnel, ‘Look, all we do is run and fight. There’s got to be a better way to live.’,” Reedus said. “And as the characters get older and the world gets more settled in the apocalyptic situation, there are people around us that are making lemonade out of lemons and making it work. That storyline, that idea really goes into next season.”
Showrunner David described the inspiration for the most recent episode, which he called a side quest. “There was a bunch of elements that came together on that episode. when we knew that we were filming in Spain, where all the Spaghetti Westerns were made,” he said.
“We wanted to do one that really leaned into the Sergio Leone of it and used the location. And we just thought it was a cool idea to say, what would happen if Sergio Leone made an episode of The Walking Dead with Daryl Dixon? That combined with the idea of finding pockets in the apocalypse that we hadn’t told stories about,” Zobel said.
When asked about other locations they’d love to see in The Walking Dead universe, Reedus mentioned Asia, Africa, and Egypt. Zabel said they’d discussed Africa, specifically Morocco. He said Japan or Korea would be interesting to explore.
Norman Reedus described his first time working with Melissa McBride (Carol) in the original The Walking Dead series. “Our first scene ever together she was supposed to pickax her husband, and I liked her. I didn’t really know her yet. I kept dipping the pickax in more and more blood and guts so every take would be worse and grosser. And finally, she just goes, ‘GIVE ME THAT!’ and I was like oh, I like this girl. That’s kind of how we met.”
“I kind of came into acting by accident,” Reedus recalled of his early career. “I didn’t know it’s what I wanted to do. I did a lot of independent films in the beginning. I miss independent film days. I miss them. I was always kind of creepy. I kind of have that look like I’m going to steal your purse. You know what I mean? So those are a lot of the roles I did. But this job, I got interested in the art of it, the editing of it, the lighting of it, the writing of it. I like to know what everybody does.”
“They really love the show in Spain, in Europe in general,” Reedus said. “They freak out for it. People love to go to work everyday. They talk about what we’re doing. They’re excited about what we’ve done. It feels a lot like the earliest, earlier seasons of the flagship show. It feels like that, which I’ve always been chasing that ever since, like a lightning in a bottle sort of feeling.”
The season finale of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon airs Sunday, October 19, on AMC.
