Fear the Walking Dead debuts on Sunday, August 23 on AMC. We had a chance to talk to the cast and creators about what this new series brings to the world of the zombie apocalypse.
Fear the Walking Dead is set in East Los Angeles during the time period that Rick Grimes was in his coma. Essentially it’s a tale of how the world started to fall apart: the disbelief, the denial, and the disintegration of order. On the other hand, The Walking Dead is a survivors’ tale of a world that has already fallen apart where what walkers are capable of, and man’s inhumanity to man, is a known quantity.
On a certain level, Fear the Walking Dead is scarier than The Walking Dead. To start off, there is no comic that the series is directly based upon to clue viewers in regarding what is about to happen. It gives the writers a lot of freedom to explore the universe in any way they want without disappointing the fanbase. Executive producer Gale Anne Hurd addressed this freedom by telling us, “the good news is obviously we have the co-creators of the series: Dave Erickson, who had worked with Robert Kirkman before, Robert Kirkman who created this universe in which this show exists… at the same time we don’t have to worry about people saying, when is Neegan going to show up? So that’s two sides of the same coin.”
As was the case with The Walking Dead cast, the Fear the Walking Dead roster is comprised of some TV veterans, as well as relative newcomers. Obviously the cast of Fear the Walking Dead knew how big the show they were getting into had the possibility of becoming. Some were already fans of the show, and others were die-hard comic fans even before the show aired on AMC.
Veteran actor and two-time Emmy nominee Rubén Blades, who plays the Salvadoran family patriarch Daniel Salazar, has been passionately hooked on the series from the start. “I have all the comics, I collect comic books actually,” he told us. “Probably one of the few people in the group I think that does. I’ve been collecting comics since I was a kid so … yes I am a fan.”
One of the things that struck us immediately is that Fear the Walking Dead is about the 21st century American family and their typical problems. Society isn’t at the point yet where catastrophic losses have occurred. Whereas in The Walking Dead, Daryl and Rick consider themselves brothers not by biology, but by blood spilt, trust, and loyalty. Family in their world is no longer solely defined by blood.
Family in East Los Angeles is about as diverse as Modern Family, only with a lot less humor. There are cross-cultural, blended families such as the Manawa/Clark families, who are trying to make things work with the complications of drug addiction and resentment. There are two-generation immigrant families pursuing the American Dream such as the Salazar family, originally from El Salvador. There is also the Ortiz/Manawa family, where a single parent has to play mediator between an angry child and ex-husband.
On page 2: The commitment to diversity
As for why East Los Angeles is the locale, it wasn’t just about wanting a city that was close to where the showrunners lived. Creator and executive producer, Dave Erickson, explains, “Los Angeles is really, for me, it’s a place of reinvention. It’s a place where people’s identities shift, and that format is something that sort of threads throughout most of our characters. Many of our characters, they’ve come to California on their way many to escape their past to sort of bury sins, and some of our characters, they have committed crimes. They’ve had crimes done to them and it becomes this interesting stew where in order to survive in this new world, some of them are going to have regress and go back to who they were as opposed to simply growing and surviving and learning how to grapple with the apocalypse.”
Mercedes Mason, who plays Ofelia Salazar, the daughter of Rubén Blades’ Daniel, echoed Erikson’s take on East Los Angeles. Mason’s character is a second generation immigrant who wants to live up to the sacrifices of her parents to achieve the success of the American Dream, but at the same time, “Our culture doesn’t define us.” She shared, “It’s all about LA and it’s such a melting pot of people coming in. And on top of that, you know, people come to LA with dreams. Everybody comes to either escape something, or you want something, and you’re trying to get something. So you have all those sort of things meeting in the middle of cultures trying to get along.”
Speaking of cultures, Fear the Walking Dead has a diversity that much of network and cable TV lacks. One of the best parts about the diversity is that it’s not stereotypical. It’s part of who the characters are, but it’s not the main focus of the show. The diversity is just part of everyday, normal life… as normal as life in the zombie apocalypse is ever going to get.
“One of the reasons we’re setting it in Los Angeles, it’s a multi-cultural city, it’s where people are blended in a way that, I think, reflects the blended family in this show,” stated Gale Anne Hurd. “I think what you have seen on television is a misrepresentation of what the communities in East L.A. are like.”
Cliff Curtis, a native of New Zealand and of Maori descent, who plays newly divorced English teacher Travis Manawa, said the diversity was a draw to the project. “They’ve allowed me to have my last name be Manawa, which is a Maori name, which means ‘heart’ and to make me be Maori, and I don’t have to then be anything. That’s our East L.A. It’s as diverse as this table [the press table we were at had representatives from seven countries], and we all sit next to each other and it’s fine. We get along. We actually like each other.”
Blades, over the course of his career, has noted the stark Latino absence on television. “First of all, one of the things that I find satisfying about this is that they included Latinos in the mix. You know, usually you don’t find us represented anywhere. I mean in spite of the fact that the amount of people are Latino people in the United States and our contributions to society as a whole. So, I mean you don’t even find us in space. Finally they got us in… Oscar Isaac is in the film ‘Star Wars’ and you know, I’m very happy about that because you see, where other Latinos it’s not a matter of accents, you know? So now, the fact that we’re there is important. It’s not a token thing. So it’s not about, we have to act Latino.”
On page 3: Meeting the undead
When fans see Fear The Walking Dead, they are going to be yelling at the TV “Don’t do that!” or “The head, the head, aim for the brain.” Society doesn’t know what to make of the “infected” as they are known in this show as they haven’t determined what the problem is: is it a virus, a hallucination, a bad drug trip? Consider also that the undead have not been decaying for very long, so other than glassy eyes and the iconic rasp and stagger, they don’t look that odd.
As Dave Erikson explains, “If someone is behaving that way, you don’t go and grab a bomb here and grab the gun. You want to try to understand and help. You want to call 911.” It makes it very easy to see with that mindset how all the first responders could have fallen victim in the early days of the crisis.
Not to worry though, these newly minted zombies are plenty scary. Cliff Curtis is a self-described scaredy cat. “I was on set and this dude was in my face it was freaking me out,” he said. “The make-up was so real. It’s not the lighting or some kind of CGI thing. It’s like there’s a guy standing in front of you and it’s hard to look. For me. I don’t know, maybe Rick Grimes would deal differently, but I’m like, whoa! That is… I need a break because it’s really intense.”
Everyone has their own way of dealing with the the undead. Elizabeth Rodriguez, who plays Curtis’ ex-wife Liza Ortiz, had a unique coping mechanism off camera so she could deal with the horror on screen. “I saw my first walker, because it is so traumatic, I tend to go for full on clown, to the other side. I become like really like, ‘this is amazing. So scary.’ I just sort of like invaded the person’s space and I was like, ‘oh my god, I want to kiss you’ because it was so absurd. And I became like a little bit of the Shaun of the Dead. That’s where I go. So I go, ‘oh, my god, this is so creepy.’ That’s what happens with me, just because it’s so amazing. It could really traumatize you, so I go into, let’s take it to the other side of clowniness.”
All-in-all Fear the Walking Dead shows a lot of promise as a spin-off/prequel series. Tune in on August 23 on AMC at 9:00 ET/8:00 CT and check it out for yourself.