TV SERIES
RIP The Walking Dead The memory of AMC’s epic 11-season masterpiece will remain undead By Carol Badaracco Padgett
The transformation and total 360 turnaround tested the actor’s range, for which Bingham and likely every castmate took note. “It was an emotional rollercoaster and a great deal of fun to play, the character went so many places emotionally and psychologically,” Gilliam admits. Along with all the twists and turns of plot and character development, there’s another huge thing about The Walking Dead that its cast and crew will miss now that filming has died: the sheer magnitude of the production. ` In a 2021 interview with Georgia Hollywood Review , Atlanta-based actor Karen Ceesay who por- trayed Bertie, a Hilltop resident, said the behind-the- scenes complexity of the series was utterly to die for. “It has been an absolute blast working on the The Walking Dead in so many ways, one being how enormous the show is in every way—fan base, cast size, crew size, props, and lots and lots of blood. It’s EVERYWHERE, and to be part of something like that is a blessing,” Ceesay noted. Adding, “The sheer number of characters that have come and gone in those seasons … maybe 200+ … has been unbelievable.” The strenuousness of the huge production, too, is something that Gilliam admits that he talked about with an actor in his next project, Teen Wolf , just the other day. “I have a fond memory of passing out during my second day on the show,” he laughs. “It was an episode where there was a scene with a flooded basement, three feet of water, with a hole above it in the floor,” he describes. “My character jumped down through the hole and into the water.” Gilliam had a wet suit on, and the water was very warm. “It was a 12-hour shoot and I was in the wet suit for two hours before. They put a ladder off camera and I had to fall from it into the water. It was a light rigging, two feet above the water.” Exhausted, Gilliam eventually had no idea where he was, and so when the director called “Action!” he passed out and fell off the ladder, underwater. “It was the shot they used,” he recalls. A prank memory that Gilliam will take away with him is when castmates put tiny glittery sprinkles inside the air conditioner of Lincoln’s (Officer Grimes’) rental car. “It was 90 degrees outside and we’d been working for 12 hours, and the air conditioning blew the sprinkles all over the car when he turned it on. They’re impossible to get off, you know. It takes like 14 showers and you still have sprinkles in your eyelids.”
of the cast struck a chord. “I think the show’s success came from the closeness of the cast and crew. We all cared about the storylines, so our passion was always there to make it work or make it make sense.” And she adds, “We had fearless leaders, Greg Nicotero (primary director, executive producer and make-up special effects supervisor) being our main captain, who led with love and trusted us with our characters.” Bingham finds that this degree of trust is a very special ingredient on a series. “Production doesn’t always trust the actor with the integrity of the character. That wasn’t the case for us.” Even though Bingham brought serious chops to the series, having appeared in other series like HBO’s Boardwalk Empire and NBC’s New Amsterdam , she learned a great deal on The Walking Dead from watching Gilliam in action. “I mean, Seth is an icon. With his work on The Wire (HBO) and countless other projects, he is effortless when he’s on set,” she notes. “He sinks into whatever character he becomes. And it was a masterclass getting to see how he carried himself on-set and watching him turn it on when he was ready to throw on Gabriel.” In Father Gabriel, Gilliam had a mind-blowing character to work with: a priest who locked his congrega- tion out of church during the fall of civilization when the walkers took over the land. “He carries a great deal of guilt for that act—shame, trauma, regret—and that was the first couple of seasons with the character,” Gilliam notes. In the seventh season, though, “Father Gabriel went from being a cowardly priest to a cold-blooded killer who questions whether there’s a God at all,” he describes. “But then he regains faith and becomes a community leader.” “ I think that with all of these character archetypes that the [immense] fan base could imagine themselves as any one of a number of these people. ”
Image courtesy of AMC Networks
T hat feeling. It started in the opening scene of The Walking Dead season 1. Officer Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) comes up upon the abandoned-vehicle intersection, the fly-ridden corpses in cars outside the service station, and the little girl whose legs, slippers and stuffed bunny he spots from his vantage point under a car. Then, “Little girl? Little girl. Little girl!” She turns to face him. OMG. And shortly afterward, POW. The spellbinding series shot in Atlanta, created by writer Robert Kirkman and artist Tony Moore with a finale that will air in fall of 2022, is about a zombie apocalypse, everybody knows. But only on the bloody surface. NYC-based actor Seth Gilliam who played the conflicted, guilt-ridden, cold-blooded, and eventually fully redeemed character of Father Gabriel Stokes says The Walking Dead has been a show that every viewer can wholeheartedly relate to. “I think that with all of these character archetypes that the [immense] fan base could imagine themselves as any one of a number of these people,” Gilliam says. “The cowardly priest. The totally self-sufficient country boy tracker, Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus). The ideal, ever- ready leader in Rick (Lincoln). The badass sword-wielder in Michonne (Danai Gurira).” The list of characters goes on and on. “And everybody had a lot of heart,” Gilliam adds. “Then throw in the walkers and zombies and all kinds of dress up and costume play, the masks—that appealed to a whole other wide birth of people, along with the creative side in all of us.” For actor Margot Bingham, lovestruck character Max (formerly known as Stephanie), the commitment
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36 | THE GEORGIA HOLLYWOOD REVIEW | FALL 2022
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