It’s not easy to dance with death
The Walking Dead forces characters to adapt in order to survive the chaos
This is how it works in the ruthless world of The Walking Dead.
Should a character be about to die on AMC’s popular series — a fairly common occurrence — the actor who plays said character receives a “courtesy call” from a producer letting them know. Beyond that, cast members are generally left in the dark about what’s in store for them. It gives the whole atmosphere a certain ... edge.
“We play it as it comes along,” says actress Melissa McBride, who has played resourceful zombie-apocalypse survivor Carol Peletier for six seasons on The Walking Dead. “There is a general arc that we are given but really nothing specific. It’s very general, a bit vague. It’s exciting though. Frustrating but exciting. Frustrating in a good way. It keeps that edge. You don’t know what’s going to happen. Just like in real life.”
Of course, no one will ever say if McBride has received that courtesy call, including McBride. The first thing the 50-year-old Kentucky native says in an interview is, “I can’t talk about anything.”
But fans of the character have good reason to be hopeful. It’s only a few days away from the Season 6 première of The Walking Dead on Oct. 11, and McBride is calling on a lunch break from the Georgia set of the series, which suggests she will be around for some time to come.
Besides, as fans know, Carol Peletier is exceptionally good at survival, a trait that has given her one of the more intriguing multiseason arcs of any character of the series.
In Season 1, she was largely in the background, a soft-spoken devout Christian and abused wife who slowly began to come to the forefront as chaos, and zombies, raged around her. So, too, did some more intense aspects of her personality, culminating in a morally questionable decision in Season 4 to do away with fellow survivors who had fallen ill. It was an act that got her exiled from our conflicted hero Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), a character who doesn’t exactly shy away from doing what needs to be done for the good of the group.
But in Season 5, Carol had regained Rick’s trust and rejoined them. As the season ended, the survivors were in Alexandria, a highly politicized community striving to be civilized but, at least in the eyes of our ragtag heroes, hopelessly naive about the realities outside their carefully fortified walls. As tends to happen in The Walking Dead, the group found themselves in the midst of a violent power struggle. Carol, who is back being Rick’s confidante, cunningly took on the role of a mousey housewife in hopes of being seen as non-threatening by the residents of Alexandria. This, of course, puts her in a good position to spy for Rick and the rest of the group.
“The whole evolution, the changes that she has gone through, what she has been required to do to survive and how it’s affected her and morphed her, it’s been a thrill for me to play this role,” McBride said. “I think, partly, it’s doing what she has to do to stay alive and keep the people that she loves alive and also to hang onto her true self.”
While loyal and brave, Carol’s true self can often do not-nice things when it comes to protecting the group, which has resulted in some of the more harrowing scenes in The Walking Dead. There was the aforementioned dispatching of sick survivors in Season 4. Later, she made the agonizing decision to put the bullet in the head of young Lizzie Samuels, a 12-year-old girl who saw Carol as a motherly figure but became increasingly psychotic.
In some ways, these moments reflect a central theme in the Walking Dead.
“It really is what the show is about: What’s right? The rules are changing,” she says. “It’s perception and survival. We have to adapt.”
Shooting in Georgia often means the cast is cut off from the frenzied fandom the show inspires. But McBride certainly catches glimpses of it. She occasionally ventures onto twitter to see what fans are saying about the character and the show. Rick forcing her to leave the group in Season 4, for instance, sparked a war between Team Rick and Team Carol.
“They get so excited and I love that,” McBride says. “I love seeing them lose their minds trying to figure out what to do with themselves until the next episode.”
Our protagonists may be friends again, but the survivors nevertheless face a usual mix of paranoia and power struggles in their adopted home. The season opener also offers a grim reminder that “the dead,” who in some ways were starting to become little more than a background nuisance as survivors fought among themselves, can still be very dangerous. This reflects another central theme in the show, McBride says.
“There is power in numbers,” she says. “And as you get more people in your group, the more dangerous you become, just like the walkers. They are like gnats. By themselves, they are like pests. Now, with these herds ... with numbers like that you can get overwhelmed. It’s very dangerous.”
I think, partly, it’s doing what she has to do to stay alive and keep the people that she loves alive and also to hang onto her true self.