Lead Walking Dead actor Andrew Lincoln got glitter-bombed by cast-mate Norman Reedus at San Diego Comic-Con, but that could not distract from the main question every fan had: which of the series main characters did new villain Negan kill in the season six finale?
Fans wanted to know not just during the Friday panel but during the panel preceding it, which featured cast from prequel Fear the Walking Dead. One anxiously asked the two series’ producers, Robert Kirkman and Gale Ann Hurd, to give them a hint. They were not even distracted by the huge tiger in the trailer for the Walking Dead’s seventh season, which made good on Hurd’s promise in the pre-trailer chatter of “some interesting nonhuman characters”.
Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who plays Negan, got some rousing applause when he came out to talk to the audience, despite having only been in the series for a few minutes at the end of the sixth season.
Kirkman tried to head off fan questions at the beginning of the panel: “OK, Negan killed … you’re gonna love who he killed,” he said. “It’s gonna be great.”
Thriller, Dia de Los Muertos and Fear the Walking Dead
The panel for the prequel series was appropriately morbid, but in a fun way. Near the very end of the presentation, a small girl took the microphone and, haltingly, asked: “If you were going to die a horrible death, what would you like it to be?”
The cast ad-libbed. Colman Domingo, who plays Victor Strand, said he’d like an anticlimactic final scene, like a beesting. Alycia Debnam-Carey, who plays Alicia Clark said she wanted “a West Side Story-style knife duel between Alicia and [Mercedes Mason’s character] Ofelia”.
Mason said she hoped her character would become less of a shrinking violet.
“I just want her nickname in season three to be Hammerface or Swordface or Hatchetface, and for her to ruin people’s faces with said objects,” Mason said. “I’d like to see her start as a kind of meek little larva and then turn into a really violent butterfly.”
The highlight of the panel was a blooper reel featuring a high-quality impromptu version of Michael Jackson’s dance moves from the Beat It video by Domingo.
“Colman, how do you just break out into a perfectly choreographed Beat it dance?” asked Chris Hardwick, moderator of both panels.
“I’m from the theater,” Domingo replied. “We always have some jazz hands available.”
The dance ended up on the cutting room floor, but Hardwick pleaded for a different Jackson song.
“Do Thriller.” he said. “You have to do Thriller. You have the zombies.”
Fear’s plotlines have flirted with contemporary politics – Kirkman said that wasn’t intentional.
“It wasn’t planned,” added showrunner Dave Erickson. “One of the great things about the genre is that it taps into whatever fears and phobias are going on in the world. You get to inject whatever fears or phobias you have into the zombies and then kill them.”
Glitter, Karen and Sexy Sidekicks
A slip of the tongue from Walking Dead producer Scott M Gimple created a new character when he mispronounced “Carol” as “Karen” during the panel for the main show. Over the course of the next hour, Karen got an eyepatch, a mustache and a pet issue – zombie rights.
Reedus threw a surprisingly large amount of body glitter at Andrew Lincoln, who immediately embraced him, leaving the pair covered in little reflective bits and reasons for Hardwick to crack jokes.
“That stuff’s like clown herpes,” he observed. A little later: “Andy, it looks like you’ve been doing filthy things at the circus.”
The gift kept on giving: whenever the camera cut back to the pair, their sparkling countenances got a laugh.
“It looks like you guys made out at like, a Michael’s,” Hardwick said.
The panel conversation took a serious turn when a young woman took the microphone to praise Danai Gurira’s portrayal of Michonne and thank the show’s writers for keeping the character’s personality away from tropes that plague the portrayals of black women.
“She’s not a sexy sidekick,” the woman said, with relief.
Gurira, a celebrated playwright, said she sympathized with the questioner’s concerns about representation.
“I have always been a black girl,” Gurira said, with a laugh. “I was born that way. I did a course on racial representation in media when I was in college, and it was a pretty unfortunate, dismal portrayal in the data collection we had at the end of the day, and I’m really grateful to be in a show where humanity is pursued before any of that stuff.”
She counseled optimism.
“Change will always cause some people to feel uncomfortable, and that’s OK. Be patient with them and take them along.”
The series, she said, would help to “break that barrier and help more of those portrayals to be freely expressed”.
