Barking with delight:
It’s a dog’s life on the set of The Walking Dead.
Most hunters have a dog and The Walking Dead’s scraggly haired, crossbow-wielding Daryl Dixon is no exception. The back story of Dog (the pet’s name) is one of the tales featured in the special six-episode mini-series of the zombie drama now screening worldwide as a lead-up to the series’ 11th and final series which will play out later this year and into 2022.
“It’s about time that we saw some back story on Dog. He’s really the most well-mannered cast member that we have on the show, the most professional, the most fun to work with,” says actor Normal Reedus, who has played Daryl since the show’s first episode. “He knows all his lines, his marks.” Reedus lobbied the producers long and hard to give Daryl a dog but is not sure if his efforts were behind the final decision to do so. “But I’m happy we have a dog, for sure. I can’t wait for a little doggy action figure,” he says, confessing he doesn’t have a canine companion of his own in real life. “I have a cat and if I got a dog the cat would be super furious. My cat is a bit of an a..hole but he’s been with me for a long time and I love the cat.” The cat joined the Reedus household as a pet for Mingus, 21, the son he shares with his former partner supermodel Helena Christensen. “When my son was five he said, ‘I need a black kitten’ and I had no idea why. We were in New York and we found a little stray black cat at an adoption place. The
“He knows all his lines, his marks.”
– Norman Reedus on his canine companion
cat was super feral, just shredded my neck, and now he is somehow my cat and he travels with me everywhere.”
And Reedus – a modelturned-actor who is also an artist exhibiting internationally – is a keen traveller.
In fact, his last trip before the Covid-19 pandemic closed the world, was to New Zealand at the start of 2020 to film two episodes of the fifth series of his travel show Ride With Norman Reedus.
“It’s such a beautiful place. It’s magical. We shot one in the north and one in the south and we got bombarded (with fans) everywhere we went,” he says, adding he then headed back home to Los Angeles for a break, before flying to Italy to continue filming.
“Then AMC (the channel that makes the series) called and said, ‘You are not going to Italy, there’s a pandemic. Stay put.’ A year later I got out of staying put.”
Now Reedus and his The Walking Dead co-stars are back filming the show’s final episodes and waiting to learn more about the spin-off featuring Daryl and Carol Peletier (played by Melissa McBride) that will follow.
“We found out about the spin-off when the show hadn’t made the announcement that it was going to be the last season yet,” he says.
“I think we were both under the impression that both shows would be going on at the same time and possibly we would visit that world, maybe criss-cross a little bit, so it came as a shock that one was ending.”
Now Reedus is focusing on the final series of The Walking Dead, admitting he hopes the show goes out “large”.
“I think we owe it to ourselves, owe it to the fans of the show, to go out big and I am assuming that’s what we are going to do. That’s what it feels like we’re doing,” he says.
“These episodes we are about to shoot are really large in scale, they’re really well written. There’s a lot of great things for everybody to do in them.”
Reedus admits the cast members have a big job ahead of them.
“We have 13 to 14 straight months of filming right now. It’s the longest stretch we’ve ever done but it feels good and it feels like we’re here to do what we’re supposed to. I look forward to filming it,” he says, adding he has no trouble understanding the popularity of the series that was, at one time, one of the most watched in the world.
“I think it’s about people who would never have come together normally but they have to come together, work together and rely on each other,” he says.
“They stick up for each other and they respect each other and they need each other to survive and they do it. I think that is the glue that keeps relevant.”