Walking Dead fans! Did you know?

Ome

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Carl's stunt double is a 31-year-old woman

As revealed in a Walking Dead special on AMC, this is what several of the cast's doubles look like:


As with many of the actors, Chandler Riggs actually has several different doubles – both for stunts and for long photo shots. Before season 4, Carl's stunt double was Savana Jade Wehunt, a 21-year-old actress who also played The Governor's zombie daughter



And here he is hanging out with his 31-year-old stunt double Emily Brobst:



The logo has been decaying since day one

You may not have noticed, but the opening title's main logo has been getting darker and grimier with each season:

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There's a hell of a lot of green screen

For an example of how clever the SFX department on the show is: the missing arms on Michonne's walkers were made with "green screen gloves".



And walkers are given clever tights:









Extras have to go through 'walker school'

When actors are cast as 'walkers', they have to complete a rigorous training programme before they can even appear on The Walking Dead.

These guys are instructed on exactly how to move around, and apparently the key instruction is to pretend that they're coming out of a bar at 2am. So, if you need a gig, just get drunk and walk around AMC's studios.



The word 'zombie' is never said



They're occasionally labelled 'biters' or 'the herd', but Robert Kirkman wanted to portray a world in which movies like Night of the Living Dead don't exist, so that the characters would have zero concept as to what these monsters were. The same isn't true in his comic, where they were called zombies for the first few volumes.


Walker blinks are edited out via CGI




There's attention to detail and then there's this: the special effects team have to pick out any time that a walker blinks on camera and edit it out.

The exercise makes sense, as walkers most likely wouldn't be able to (or need to) moisten their eyeballs every few seconds. What with them being dead and all.



Walkers are actually eating vinegar-soaked ham




The flesh that we see walkers eating is actually ham plunged in a vat of vinegar, just so the actors have something relatively decent to eat.

In earlier seasons, the ham was actually covered in BBQ sauce, but it kept messing up the zombie make-up.



Thomas Jane nearly played Rick


Frank Darabont initially intended to bring in Thomas Jane, who he worked with on The Mist, to play lead character Rick Grimes when HBO nearly took on the project. (Incidentally, The Mist also starred Walking Dead favourites Laurie Holden, Jeffrey DeMunn and Melissa McBride.)

Eventually, he lost out to Andrew Lincoln (he also nearly played Don Draper, whoops) – but there was a little reference to Jane in the opening episode. The blood stain left behind on Rick's shirt after his first walker kill appears to resemble The Punisher's skull logo. Who played The Punisher? Mr Jane.



It almost became a crime-of-the-week procedural



Creator Frank Darabont pitched The Walking Dead at various networks before AMC came along. At NBC, it had frankly terrifying ideas for what direction to take the show. At first, it didn't even want zombies in it.

It later offered a compromise: turn it into a procedural show where the lead characters "solve a zombie crime of the week". So, like Miami Vice but with flesh-eaters instead of drugs. Thankfully, Frank politely declined and found its perfect home.



Breaking Bad is set in the same universe



Well, not officially. The two AMC shows (sort of) cross over in season two of Walking Dead when Daryl reveals that Merle was a drug dealer before the walkers arrived, and we see Merle's stash clearly has Walter White's trademark Blue Sky meth at the bottom.




 

Jessie

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Cool tidbits @Ome

Did you know?

Dale's death at the end of season two was devastating and we're still not over it, but did you know that he actually asked to die? Jeffrey DeMunn reportedly fell out with the show after his friend Frank Darabont was fired halfway through the season and asked to be written out. As a sign of respect, Dale's guts in the death scene were made from chicken breasts instead of vinegar hams. Quite the accolade.


OMG glad this didn’t happen
IronE Singleton, aka T-Dog, was never meant to die. Rumour has it that the character wasn't too popular, so they killed him off. In the season three prison takeover, it was Carol who was meant to get bitten, but producers reportedly decided to sacrifice T-Dog instead.

Remember seeing Michonne's face in the second season finale? No? That's because you didn't. Danai Gurira wasn't cast until after the season finished shooting, so the character was played someone else and had her face covered by a hood the whole time.
 
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