Having a job that involves you pretending to kill zombies all day sounds like a dream come true, so it’s nice to see that Danai Gurira, aka The Walking Dead‘s Michonne enjoys doing her job just as much as we enjoy watching her.
In fact, we got a glimpse into her enthusiasm in this recent interview, where the actress was asked what her favorite walker kill was. She immediately singles out season 4, episode 9, “After.” In this outing, Michonne comes to a kind of epiphany about her purpose in life – namely, carving up walkers with a machete.
Originally, she was going to understand this by slaughtering just 10 of them (which was all the show had budgeted for for the scene). But when she got into the moment she just… kept going. She steamed past 10, then 12, then 16, until she was surrounded by the twitching corpses of 24 walkers.
“I really enjoy the scene in season 4, episode 9 where she kind of goes through her own catharsis through killing two dozen walkers at the same time,” Gurira said. “The special magic of it was that I was only supposed to kill 10, and they’d only budgeted for 10 so they said, ‘You can only kill 10.’”
Apparently, Greg Nicotero just never called cut, having too much fun watching her go to town on the undead horde. It left us with one of most memorable moments of The Walking Dead’s fourth season and a genuine kickass physical and emotional crescendo for Michonne.
It also proved that the actors playing the walkers in the show are some seriously skilled performers, apparently willing to improvise their way through a complex fight scene at a moment’s notice. Gurira explains: “the folks playing the walkers were so awesome. They just went with whatever I did.”
Danai Gurira’s Michonne is already confirmed to be appearing in the upcoming season 8 premiere “Mercy,” which will also be the one-hundredth episode of the smash-hit zombie drama. She took quite a beating at the hand’s of Negan’s thugs at the end of season 7, so let’s hope that the break has given her time enough to get back to her full walker-choppin’ strength.
The Walking Dead season 8 premieres on AMC on October 22nd.
