‘I KNOW PEOPLE LIKE HER’
McBride of ‘Walking Dead’ breaks down speaking about her abused-wife character
Melissa McBride’s character on “The Walking Dead” has undergone one of the biggest transformations on the show, but the actress still gets tearful when thinking about the real life domestic violence victims who weren’t as lucky as the one she plays.
Her character on AMC’s post-apocalyptic zombie show, Carol Peletier, was physically abused by her husband until he was eaten by the undead in Season 1. On the show, she slowly progresses from a battered wife to a badass who’s often the first to step up and protect others in her group.
But McBride, 53, knows that not all domestic abuse victims have such a positive outcome. And the actress broke down when asked at an AMC Networks summit Monday what’s it’s meant to her to play a survivor.
“Personally, it’s been so important to me to see her become strong,” McBride said. “It’s really hard for me to talk about that aspect of her without getting just boiled up inside because I know people like her that didn’t make it.
“So that aspect has always been very important to me,” the actress added, as she teared up. “But yes, empathy, you need more of that. I would love to see a day when this doesn’t happen. These, by the way, are good tears because it’s important and it was a good thing what’s happened to Carol.”
In the comic book series that the show is based on, Carol commits suicide by letting a walker bite her — but McBride and Scott Gimple, chief content officer of “The Walking Dead,” were determined to give the TV character a stronger story line.
In Season 3 of the series, which just wrapped up its ninth season, there was talk about about Carol going away, the AMC exec said.
“I was dead set against it,” said Gimple, who was on the same AMC panel, “How Stories are Told: Voices of Genre.”
“I thought it would be a great story to see a person who came from abuse become the hero and not in an easy way, that she herself had to struggle with the power that she found.
“And that is I think Carol’s great story is that she found that she was strong, she found she had this superpower, but then it wouldn’t be easy,” Gimple added. “It wasn’t happyever-after after that, that she had responsibility and there was a weight to that strength that she found.”
Indeed, though Carol remains strong on the show, she has struggled in past seasons, at one point isolating herself in a cottage away from the rest of the group and refusing to fight her enemies because she doesn’t want to kill anymore. But she’s always endured.
“It’s such a wonderful thing to play her,” McBride said. “And there’s some great storytelling with this character, who has just brought herself up and risen to the occasion to do what she needs to do to survive and to help the people that she cares about also survive. So it’s been pretty amazing.”