The Walking Dead Cast Doesn't Even Know Who Negan Kills
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Things will never quite be the same between The Walking Dead's writers and their fans. The show's finale ended on a ginormous cliffhanger, with Negan brutally bashing in the head of an unknown survivor. While we're frantically piecing together clues as to who it might be, the cast might be doing the same thing. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, executive producer Greg Nicotero revealed that despite their dismay at the finale's script, the actors themselves don't even know who Negan kills. When asked if the cast knew who was dying when they filmed the final sequence, here's what Nicotero said:
"No. It was specifically written that way. The POV shot looking up at Negan in that last moment, I don't think anyone on that knew what happened. As a matter of fact, if I'm not mistaken, I think we had wrapped all of the actors, because the shot we did with Negan, the sun was coming up and Jeffrey was about to get on a plane and fly back to New York and we didn't have anybody there because we didn't want even somebody on the crew or somebody there to go, 'Oh I get it, I know what's going to happen.' So I think they were all gone. We built a little rig for Jeffrey [Dean Morgan] to hit so that there would be impact with the baseball bat."
So for better or worse, the cast is just as far out of the loop as we are. In fact, the creators went out of their way to disorient the audience when it comes to the identity of the victim.
"It's always tricky because the fans of the show are very loyal and very passionate and very observant, so in terms of what the background was, even editorially, you can see that they picked up the pace when he starts doing eeny meeny miny moe — we start picking up the pace, so you see the baseball bat in front of every single person's face, and the duration of the cuts gets faster, faster, faster until we cut to looking up at Jeffrey and him saying, 'You are it,' and swinging the bat at the camera. The show was always intended to end on that point of view and go to black where we would continue to hear the impact of the baseball bat and the screaming and the crying, and the reactions."
Bet he didn't expect us to pull out every single frame of Negan's "Eeny Meeny Miny Moe" game. Who's the sucker now, Nicotero?!