Merritt Wever Speaks
This is another one of those morning-after newsposts that is going to contain some spoilers for the Walking Dead episode that aired the previous night. So if it’s still sitting in your DVR pile and you haven’t gotten to it yet, please do so before reading this, because you are correct in assuming someone died last night. Maybe it was Fake Doctor and maybe it wasn’t; go see the episode to find out.
Finished with it now? Okay, it was Fake Doctor. The actress who played Denise, Merritt Wever, had a postmortem chat with Entertainment Weekly about her role and ultimate fate. It turns out, unlike most actors who work on this show, she knew all along.
” I always knew that it would be a one-season thing — that this was going to be a finite experience on the show — so I didn’t have to go through finding out that I had died,” Wever says. She wasn’t given official confirmation, she just got the vibe. “I assumed that it would happen. That’s how people tend to make it off the show. A couple of weeks before we shot the episode, Scott called and let me know the specifics of it. He’ll call and give you an idea of the emotional nuts and bolts of things, and he told me how it was actually going to happen as well.”
Those who read the comics know an arrow to the head is how Abraham was originally offed, not Denise. That was something Wever didn’t know. “No! I wasn’t [aware], because I don’t know anything about the comics. I had heard during production that stories were being fudged and that they weren’t following the books to a tee, but I didn’t know the specifics.”
“We’re like an hour outside of Atlanta proper and all these people who weren’t working came in. And they come in at night and wait for your last shot. It’s a really, really inclusive, generous bunch of folks down there. And I tried not to cry. That’s all I did. I’d like to say I succeeded.”
Read the full interview at EW.com.