The Walking Dead: Negan's Victim Speaks Out on 'Messed-Up' Exit
Warning: The following doesn’t just contain spoilers for the Season 7 premiere of The Walking Dead, it contains big ol’ bashed-in skull-shaped spoilers. So if you’ve yet to watch the episode — and think you’ll be able to bear to — proceed no further.
Glenn’s death in Sunday’s Walking Dead premiere was meant to be — and portrayer Steven Yeun would not have wanted it to go down any other way.
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On the Talking Dead after show, Yeun said his character’s “messed-up” exit — as preordained in Issue No. 100 of Robert Kirkman’s comic — was “such an iconic moment” that he went to Gimple and Kirkman and demanded, “‘Don’t give that to anybody [else]'”
Yeun added that, “It’s such a gnarly thing to say, but [acting out that scene] was very wild… and to do it in the way we did it was brave and… super-effective…. Every single person crushed it.”
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Having to keep Glenn’s fate a secret for the past five months “came with its own set of difficulties,” Yeun conceded, noting that he had to “dive into a hole for a while.” He then joked, “It was fun to lie to people. But after a while, you just can’t lie anymore, so I just stopped talking to people.”
Showrunner Scott M. Gimple said the decision to have Negan kill Glenn and Abraham was made roughly “two years” ago, adding that deaths had to be significant enough to “break Rick” and make the audience believe that “Rick would be under the thumb of Negan.”
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