On the Set of The Walking Dead: There’s No Place Like Home

This Sunday, Oct. 16, The Walking Dead returns for a second season with a 90-minute premiere. AMC may be known for its quality drama—Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Killing—but none of those shows could match the zombie apocalypse series’ ratings. Six million tuned into last season’s finale, which ended with a group of survivors driving away in convoy from the burning CDC (Center for Disease Control) in Atlanta. ?

Season 2, which picks up minutes after the end of the first season, is concerned with a search for home and defending it. Last season’s premiere saw Deputy Sheriff Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) waking up from a coma in a hospital bed to find a city in chaos from a sudden outbreak which causes the living dead to rise. Stunned, he searches for his wife Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies) and son. ?

Jon Bernthal, who plays Shane Walsh, Rick Grimes’s former colleague and best-friend-turned-rival, describes the desperate times the survivors face in the show’s second season. He’s taking a break from shooting the ninth of 13 new episodes on set in Sharpsburg, Ga., just south of Atlanta. It’s mid September, and the small town has been overtaken by cast and crew for most of the summer. “We’ll see very quickly in this season that when these characters are on the run, when they don’t have a home they’ll lose people. It’s dangerous. I think the scariest thing that can happen to you in this kind of situation where there’s nowhere to run, nowhere to hide is also being without a base, without a home.”

??In nearby Senoia, an imposing, isolated Southern Gothic house doubles as the new base for the group. Yards away from the main house owned by new character Hershel Greene (Scott Wilson), under a canopy of trees, the survivors make camp this season and park their now iconic Winnebago. In a rare set up, the real owners of the large farmhouse have migrated to the upstairs floors for six months as production continues sporadically down below, zombies and all.

??“The farm represents this unbelievable safe haven,” explains Bernthal, “but just like everything else in the zombie apocalypse, things are never exactly what they appear. We see time and time again on this show, the second these people start to let their guard down in any way, it just brings on more and more danger. And when the zombies don’t become an immediate threat, I think it gives an opportunity for the characters to get way, way more dangerous towards each other.”?

?Taking a seat in a Walking Dead director’s chair and grabbing a pair of headphones, I watch the monitors in front of me and see Lincoln, Scott Wilson and other cast members in a scene filled with tension and suspicion. Two strangers try to discover where the other survivors are hiding out. The scene is set in a saloon bar complete with swinging doors in a re-dressed building that’s usually an antiques store in Sharspburg.?? Clark Johnson, who played City Editor Gus Haynes in The Wire, is directing this particular episode, which he feels has the mood of a classic American genre. Appropriately, he’s wearing a Stetson. “This to me is a Western,” he says. “I was just whistling The Good, the Bad and the Ugly theme… I don’t have that many zombies in my episode. I was kind of bummed out. I got here and said, where the hell are my zombies? They whacked them all in the episode before. Sort of,” he backtracks, trying to not reveal any spoilers about upcoming episodes.??

“What’s cool about this show is that every once in a while they explore the interpersonal between humans,” he continues. “This episode, I’m setting up conflict between the living characters. One scene I’m shooting here, it’s almost Once Upon a Time in the West with [Charles] Bronson and [Henry] Fonda, so stylized and so distinct the way they set up reaching for the weapon, the draw out in the dusty streets with the fake facades of the Western town. It’s that thing. He comes into the bar, the bar doors swing open with a creak, it’s all that.”??

Later on, British actor Lincoln, dressed all in black and maintaining his Georgia accent whilst on set, hands me a firearm straight out of a Western. I weigh it up and hand it back. “Think you’ll be needing this to kill zombies.”

??But there’s an absence of zombies on set today which brings relief to those trying to eat lunch in the canteen when shooting breaks. “Sitting right across the zombies at lunch, I can’t do it,” says a production assistant holding her throat and grimacing.

??On some days between 120 and 150 zombie extras are on set at the same time, for want of a better term, limbering up. Zombies are grouped into three categories headed up by “hero zombies”—extras who really know how to shuffle lifeless limbs and who can truly horrify in close-ups. Hero zombies are usually in make-up as early as 3 a.m. on a “zombie day.”

Greg Nicotero, an industry leader fresh from an Emmy win for make-up effects, holds zombie school where he grades extras in a little book according to their looks and movements.?

?“This season I just said, get me the skinniest, thinnest people with long necks and big eyes,” he says. “You put prosthetics on them then visually they look emaciated and they look decayed and rotted, and I think that that plays even more so in this season than it did in last season, because we were able to get a lot closer to the visual aesthetic we’re going for, seeing the grinning teeth and the eyes and the stringy hair. This season we have sculpted a lot of new pieces, a lot of new prosthetics, and we have a lot of hero characters.”??

A crew member walks by holding a prosthetic leg, which draws a few glances. Magnify that a thousand times, and you can imagine the reaction when one of the living dead scenes was filmed for Season 2.

??“This show is inherently different than last year, because last year we were in the middle of the city, a walker could come out of any building anywhere,” adds Nicatero with enthusiasm as infectious as a zombie bite. “This year, because we sidetracked to Hershel’s farm much like in the graphic novel, the farm certainly isn’t populated with walkers, so there are a couple of episodes that are not walker-heavy and then all of a sudden the next one, boom!—there are 60 or 80 of them. They set up this thing in Season 2 where they travel in packs. We came up with a lot of really creepy, great moments and we made silicone feet so you could see the feet of zombies, all bloated and black and purple.”??

Of course, the enemy this season is not just the living dead. Executive producer Gale Anne Hurd, renowned as the writer of The Terminator, describes the drama between characters: “We set up some tension last season, that principle one, of course, is the triangle between Lori, Rick and Shane, and that’s going to be an essential conflict this season, something that’s growing.”??

In addition there’s the souring of the relationship between the group’s eldest member, RV driver Dale Horvath (Jeffrey DeMunn) and Andrea (Laurie Holden), driven to despair after the loss of her sister to a rabid attack of the zombies. “We have something that began at the end of last season. Andrea is not really too thrilled that Dale saved her from the CDC,” adds Hurd.??

“The usual three ways we get drama in a particular episode are Man versus Man, Man versus Nature, in this case Nature being the zombies; and Man versus Himself. Because on Hershel’s farm you can forget you are living in a post-zombie apocalypse, it makes it even more startling when you encounter one, as you’ll see this season.”

??Talking of Man versus Nature, the move to rural Georgia this season has presented a few problems to the cast. Last summer Steven Yeun, who plays Glenn, a young pizza delivery boy who joins Rick Grimes’s group, passed out due to the heat, which regularly tips over 100 degrees. This season, Mother Nature had another trick up her sleeve. “We have chiggers and they bite you. I still have a couple of bites but they’re fine. Ticks are not as friendly. It’s not comfortable to have a tick anywhere but I found one in that private area,” laughs Yeun. “I burned the shit out of that tick! So, I win! I won that round.”

??Perched on an upturned wooden crate in a makeshift interview room on the Sharpsburg set, Yeun hints that Glenn and a new character Maggie Greene,
played by Lauren Cohan, become close this season. “It’s really cool and Lauren is fantastic,” he says. “Jon [Bernthal] said this to me, which makes total sense: ‘Your character really takes off, and it really makes sense to everyone and yourself when they have something very specific to live for and to love.’ The stakes are then higher. I think Glenn before was kind of reckless, putting his life on the line because he wants that glory. But now, you put someone else into the mix you realize, ‘I also have to live for them.’ So it just changes the game.”??

One character who won’t be getting a love interest this season is crossbow-wielding ex-con Daryl Dixon, played by Norman Reedus, still smarting from the group’s abandonment of his older brother. “I’m kind of playing him like he’s a virgin, to be honest. So as far as love interest, I don’t know,” he smiles, pausing. “But it’s a zombie apocalypse; everyone’s trying to get some before it’s over. Ain’t that right?”

??Reedus believes Daryl Dixon’s M.O. is to cause as much conflict between the survivors as possible in Season 2. “Oh fuck yeah!” he says, rubbing a tattoo on his upper arm, “I wreak havoc, for sure. I think he likes chaos and that’s where he comes from as a man. Daryl sees it happening and he thinks it’s better than television.”

??According to Robert Kirkman, who created The Walking Dead comic-book series, things are “looking good” for Season 3, and locations are already being scouted. As for the cast, however, nobody can be guaranteed survival for a whole new season. “That’s the bad thing about being on a zombie show; you never know when you’re gonna get bit,” laughs Reedus. “You never know. I think even Andy [Lincoln] doesn’t know if he’s going to go on forever. I don’t think any of us know. It’s my favorite job I’ve ever been on, so I hope it lasts a long time.”??

The Walking Dead Season 2 premiere (“What Lies Ahead”) begins on AMC on Oct. 16, 9/8c. Six webisodes start on Oct. 3 leading up to the premiere.