With one of the most shocking deaths on ‘The Walking Dead’ being included in its highly anticipated midseason premiere for Season 5, executive producer Gale Anne Hurd recently shared her thoughts on how killing off characters has been a great challenge to the team.
Hurd was interviewed for the special program ‘Hollywood Masters’, which was filmed on the Loyola Marymount University campus. According to the executive producer, telling the actors that their characters will get killed is actually more difficult to part with the actors themselves.
“It’s the hardest part of the whole show, honestly,” Hurd shared. “It’s much harder than saying goodbye to an actor. But the only person that I had to tell [directly] was the little girl that came out of the barn as a zombie at the end of the second season.”
Hurd is, of course, referring to Madison Lintz who played Sophia Peletier, Carol’s daughter, in Seasons 1 and 2.
The executive producer also opened up about recently finishing the pilot episode to a ‘Walking Dead’ spinoff just this February 6, although she did emphasized that a series has not yet been picked up.
Nonetheless, Hurd shared her future plans, including a new series that was recently picked up for 13 episodes.
“It’s called ‘Hunters’, at Syfy, and it’s based on the Whitley Strieber novel ‘Alien Hunter’”, she said.
The David O. Selznick awardee from the 2015’s Producers Guild also brought up the subject of current issues on violence, including culture, which she perceives as more dangerous than the impact of the zombie apocalypse series on its viewers.
“I worry more about the fact that we have guns on the street here,” she stated. “I mean, in Australia, countries around the world where they have the same entertainment, and they don’t have the homicide rates that we do here, it’s clear that there’s another reason for it.”
She also noted that ‘The Walking Dead’ has brought on a debate concerning the essence of being human and whether resorting to such violence is justifiable.
Meanwhile, other influential Hollywood A-listers to look forward to in upcoming ‘Hollywood Masters’ episodes include Clint Eastwood, Sean Penn, Ethan Hawke, Kenneth Branagh, Ken Burns and Quincy Jones.
