In the final shots of the first season of Fear the Walking Dead, the camera lingered over the Pacific ocean on a boat waiting off the coast. No! They couldn’t possibly be setting season two on a boat, could they?
Yup. The team behind the ratings smash The Walking Dead didn’t have any problems keeping two shows on the air – they had to do one on the water too.
It opened up a whole new load of challenges for the cast and crew, who moved down to Baja Studios in Mexico to shoot in the same giant tank James Cameron used to film Titanic. Production designers built the set for Abigail – the boat owned by Victor Strand (Coleman Domingo), the mysterious millionaire who busted Nick (Frank Dillane) out of prison in season one and reunited him with his extended family. Once the set was lowered in the water, it was incredibly calm (the tank is controlled). Still, shooting wasn’t easy.
“Water kept going up my nose,” says Brit actor Dillane about one particular scene where he has to swim in the “ocean” to investigate a shipwreck – then discovers that zombies can swim too.
Executive producer Dave Alpert sees their journey by sea as the thing that will set Fear apart from its landlocked counterpart. “There’s a reason why movies like Titanic are so huge, because being on the water has such an emotional impact,” he says. “It’s a primal thing.The question is always, you know, is the difficulty of pulling this thing off worth the emotional impact? And in our case, in this season, 100% yes.”
Fear the Walking Dead is big business. The first six-episode season averaged 7.6 million viewers, which is huge for cable, though down considerably from its 10 million-viewer opening and about half of the 14 million who regularly tune in for its big brother The Walking Dead. But on the success of those first six episodes, the second go-round has been extended to 15-episodes.
Kim Dickens, who plays protagonist Madison, agrees that getting waterlogged was worth it. “Being on this boat becomes a tinder box of emotions, with seven people with different motivations and things they are grappling with and trying to reconcile.” For Madison, that includes her son Nick, who’s still dealing with his addiction issues, and her teenage daughter Alicia feeling as if she has no purpose in the new world order.
Add into the mix her boyfriend Travis (Cliff Curtis) and his son Chris (Lorenzo James Henrie), who won’t forgive his father for euthanising his mother – and let’s not forget the two surviving members of the Salazar clan. These are family dynamics the loners on The Walking Dead could never imagine. “It is very much a family drama, first and foremost,” says executive producer Dave Erickson. “With the slow burn in season one, we got to know everybody and their dysfunctions and the conflicts in this blended family. Now, we’re still playing out those storylines – the problems Nick or Travis will have with Madison are all seeds that were planted last season.”
Things are especially bad for Ofelia Salazar (Mercedes Mason), who will play a major part in the life aquatic. “She doesn’t trust her father Daniel (Rubén Blades), because she thinks of him as quite the monster,” says Mason. “She is physically hurt, too, and she doesn’t know who to trust any more. You will see her on the precipice, trying to figure out who is a friend.”
Eventually the boat will have to reach land, which will bring some new characters, including one who survived Flight 462, a web series about a plane overtaken by zombies. But we’re promised plenty of death as well.
Of course no actor wants to see their character get the axe, but Debnam-Carey has some experience in that realm. Her character Lexa on the CW show The 100 was recently killed off (so Debnam-Carey could film Fear) and it kickstarted fan outrage because Lexa was one of the few lesbian characters on TV.
“One thing that has been comforting was the realisation that you don’t own a character,” she says. “It becomes other people’s and it’s hard because you are part of it, but there is a line where other people take over – create fan fiction, dress up as you. It’s not completely yours.”
Many fans were also irate about the season finale of The Walking Dead, which left the identity of a dead character a secret. Robert Kirman, an executive producer on Fear who created The Walking Dead, is glad this series doesn’t have a blueprint like his other one.
“It’s really refreshing to be working on Fear the Walking Dead because there isn’t that comic book to draw from,” he says. “It’s all new. It’s all exciting. It’s all different and I think there is a lot more potential in this show to actually surprise the audience in big ways.”
Given that they’re sending everyone off to a potential watery grave, there is one thing that might need to change: the title. Debnam-Carey jokes: “Shouldn’t it be, like, Fear the Swimming Dead?”
Fear the Walking Dead premieres on AMC on 10 April at 9pm EST in the US and simultaneously in the UK on AMC UK on 11 April at 2am GMT.
