‘Sometimes it’s not a bad thing to p**s off our fans.’ The Walking Dead’s Lennie James on that cliffhanger and why this season seven is ‘the most traumatic ever.’
The beating to death off-screen of one of The Walking Dead’s fan favourites by the villainous Negan, at the end of season six, has left everyone desperate to know – who has died?
Lennie James as the heroic Morgan Jones may have survived this far but with the arrival of the terrifying barbed wire club-brandishing Negan it looks like no one is safe…
Show-runner Scott Gimple says season seven is going to be a rough ride. How would you describe what's coming our way?
It certainly starts off in a really difficult and dark place. I don’t think we’ve had an opening episode to a season that has been as anticipated as the opening episode of season seven is. I would argue we’ve also never had one that is going to be as traumatic. As Scott says, it’s going to be a rough ride. We just have to get through it. Even people who think they know what’s going to happen don’t know what’s going to happen. The show has gone to extraordinary lengths to preserve the events of that episode and have done a remarkable job considering in this day and age the way that things leak. I think this is going to be an episode that fans of the show will know exactly where they were when they saw it and when they found out. And then we’ll get on with the rest of the season – but it’s not gonna be easy.
Was everyone nervous receiving scripts that they weren't going to survive this one?
Um, no, it doesn’t really work like that. I think it would be remiss of everybody involved in the show if people only found out whether they lived or died when they received the script. That would just be heartless. We don’t operate that way. If you’re going, you know you’re going. And you’re given fair warning. No one goes into an episode in which we’re going to be losing a member of the family without knowing.
Were you surprised at the fan uproar over the season 6 cliffhanger?
I wasn’t really surprised by it. I was happy for it really. On one level I took it that at least we’re doing something right. We’re engaging people and that’s part of the process as storytellers. I think there are enough things out there where people are given exactly what they want, what they expect, when they expect it. Our show is striving to do something different. We’ve got our eye on the long game.
Sometimes we’re going to excite our fans, sometimes we’re going to scare our fans, sometimes we’re gonna break their hearts, sometimes we’re gonna make them laugh, sometimes we’re gonna make them cry and sometimes we’re gonna p**s them off. And at the end of last season we apparently p**sed off a few people. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. That’s part of the journey of this show. I’m almost certain that when they see the first episode of the new season they’ll get it. They’ll understand why we ended the last one the way we did and why we’re starting the new one the way that we’re going to.
What do you do to keep in shape for a full-on show like this?
Where we shoot it is unforgiving. It’s a Georgia summer where the heat can be over 100 degrees for most of the day. We film in the main on location out in it. It’s hard on the actors. It’s much harder on our crew who are in it every minute of every day. Every single one of the crew, without question, works harder than I do. Luckily we’re in a show where we’re allowed to sweat. We don’t have to hide it. On some days it’s an advantage – there’s no acting required.
Have you enjoyed seeing Jeffrey Dean Morgan in full flow as Negan?
Negan is such an iconic character in the story of this show. I know the list of actors that were considered for this role – phenomenal actors – but I cannot imagine anyone else being Negan apart from Jeffrey Dean Morgan. From the minute he stepped onto the set he’s taken it to a level that nobody expected. It’s phenomenal to bear witness to it.
Apart from The Walking Dead you’re also a member of a very elite club of dead dodgy coppers from Line of Duty. Have you continued to watch the series since Tony Gates perished?
Absolutely. The job that Jed (Mercurio, writer) and Vicky (McClure) and Martin (Compston) and Adrian (Dunbar) and (Neil) Morrissey did last year - the way they’ve been able to sustain it - has been absolutely phenomenal. On one level we could have finished after the first series but they found a way of making it live on. Keeley (Hawes) in the second season had a really tough job to do but she completely made it her own. Then the way they used Danny Mays in season three was utterly fantastic and very clever - a real testament to Jed’s storytelling abilities. I’m really looking forward to seeing what they’re going to get up to next. I’m very, very proud to have been there at the beginning of it. It remains one of my favourite jobs of all time. I made some really good mates on it – that gang of Martin, Craig (Parkinson), Neil, Vicky and Adrian, they’re friends for life.
The Walking Dead, Monday October 24th, 9pm, Fox