The Walking Dead season 6 ended on a whopping cliffhanger, and its subsequent resolution in the season 7 premiere is without a doubt one of the most talked about and shocking moments of the entire show. Fans spent all summer debating who would die by violently meeting the business end of Negan’s baseball bat Lucille and ultimately, it was Glenn and Abraham who tragically met their demise.
But as you surely know, in an effort to keep these deaths a secret, AMC had the production team shoot several different versions of Negan’s executions. For instance, you may remember that a photo of Maggie as one of his victims leaked online prior to the premiere’s release. And while this tactic worked and ultimately threw fans off the scent, it seems that the cast took a bit of a beating while filming all this.
Speaking at San Jose Fan Fest, Christian Serratos revealed that her and her co-stars got physically sick during the time, due to the low temperatures they had to endure while shooting the death scenes.
“It was the most challenging but also the most rewarding for, I think, all of us. It was very cold, it was very emotionally exhausting. A lot of us got physically sick,” the Rosita actress said, when asked about the most challenging scene to shoot.
“I got a cold, my immune system was just shot from just expelling everything that I had. But I think it ended up like one of the best deaths.”
Steven Ogg, who played Simon on the show, also commented on this same moment a while back, echoing Serratos’ statement about how cold it was.
“It was freezing cold, and of course at that time, I was just Simon wearing his short sleeve shirt. It’s like, ‘f— this this, it’s freezing, I’m not that tough, I want Negan’s coat.’ Jeffrey is all bundled up, but then when we went to shoot, when we came back to it, it was warm. And of course, then I was like, ‘Yeah!’”
Michael Cudlitz, the man behind Abraham, had a different perspective on things though, saying:
“The stuff that a lot of times that you consider or think would be the hardest for us, is the stuff that we have the most fun doing. Because it’s emotional and there’s conflict and there’s all this stuff between the characters, and you think, ‘holy crap, that must have been difficult to do.’ And it was, but that’s the stuff we kind of live for.”
Of course, it was almost as hard on viewers as it was on the cast, watching Glenn and Abraham making their exits in such brutal fashion, but it’s fair to say that all the hard work the actors put into bringing this moment to life paid off, as it’s still one of the most shocking and attention-grabbing scenes in not only the history of The Walking Dead, but possibly television in general. And though it remains to be seen if the show will ever top it, we honestly wouldn’t rule it out.
