Peripheral character gets heavenly send-off
Underused The Walking Dead actor talks about his character, Jesus, in the mid-season finale
Spoiler alert: This story contains spoilers for The Walking Dead.
ATLANTA— The Walking Dead is a tricky show to write because it’s an ensemble show with an excessively large cast of regulars.
Tom Payne’s long-haired, swordwielding character Jesus was one that fell through the cracks, not quite getting the airtime he deserved.
But Jesus received a lovely send-off on Sunday night’s Season 9 fall finale when he valiantly fought off a host of walkers in a foggy night mist to save Eugene.
Instead of just leaving, he decided to kill off a couple more walkers — except one of those “walkers” ducked his sword swing and stabbed him with his own. Jesus died almost instantly. Welcome to the world of the Whisperers, people who dress up as walkers and walk among them. The shocking death clued in our heroes that they have a new, confounding foe in their midst, one that turns walker hordes into something far more ominous and hard to read.
Payne, in an interview, said he had expressed frustration about Jesus’s lack of character development over three seasons. In Robert Kirkman’s graphic novels, Jesus gets to do a lot more fighting and is much more central in the RickNegan war. Payne was well aware of that.
On the show, Jesus was at best a peripheral character. There was a moment where we learn he’s gay, but that aspect of him was never developed in any tangible way.
And Payne noted that despite Jesus’s supersharp fighting skills, he never directly faced off against the Saviors. Instead, we only saw him battle one on one with one of his own: Morgan. “It was a bit frustrating,” he said. During his off time (of which there was plenty), Payne learned fight moves that he never really used until the end.
“I changed my appearance for the show,” he said. “I couldn’t do any other work. I trained all the time in anticipation of some cool stuff to do.”
In the end, he said, “I enjoyed the scenes I had and the whole thing wrapped up at the right time. I got a real memorable beginning and memorable ending. Reading everyone’s reactions … it seems like it landed really well. I’m super happy with it.”
He wasn’t surprised or upset when new showrunner Angela Kang called him with the bad news. He says he was quite tranquil about it.
The final scenes were shot over a span of several days on a stage to properly control the smoky environment. Earlier, when there were scenes outside and the crew flooded fields with smoke, he said it felt like The Twilight Zone.
“It was creepy and weird and scary but also a lot of fun,” he said. And he got to work with Ross Marquand (Aaron), Norman Reedus (Daryl) and Josh McDermitt (Eugene).
“You could feel the sense of dread throughout the episode,” he said.
Payne proudly said he did all his own fight scenes. The producers gave him a final day party where he gave a speech, but he said it wasn’t actually his final day. He had to do some pickup scenes the next day. Then, a month later, he returned to do more reshoots, including close-ups of Aaron being super distraught over Jesus’s death.
Fans, after seeing Aaron and Jesus being best buds last episode, wondered online if there was more to their relationship in a romantic sense. It was never addressed in the scripts, but Payne figured they may have hooked up a time or two over six years but chose to remain friends. Payne has already been part of the Walking Deadconvention circuit the past three years and is looking forward to commiserating with fans over his character’s death in San Jose and New Jersey.