Melissa McBride talks losing a cast mate, Negan, and season 7’s bloody start
Oh, Lucille, how you torment us! We caught up with Melissa McBride, aka The Walking Dead’s Carol, and if you think losing a character from the show is hard for us, imagine losing a part of your TV family. We’ll finally learn who Negan took out with his beloved barbed-wire bat, Lucille, when the zombie-fest returns for it’s seventh season on AMC at 9 p.m. ET this Sunday.
“If you care about anybody on The Walking Dead, you should tune in (laughs). If you’ve been watching and you care about any of these characters, you should tune in. If you want to know who got the bat, you should tune in,” said McBride.
When it comes to the new season, “I, for a minute (laughs)… for a minute… thought that there was going to be a break for Carol,” she said.
“I used to think that I didn’t carry any of that home with me, and I carry a little bit, just a little bit. Enough to be cranky somedays. But there was a minute I was enjoying some lighter moments and thinking we’re in the turn. But, of course, once you go around that corner there’s always something horrible (laughs). You can bet on it. This season it’s extremely difficult emotionally for me and losing a cast member is never easy.”
If the comics are any hint, uber-villian Negan will challenge our heroes in every way. “The world keeps changing and getting more and more desperate. And that theme that’s been there all along is what are you willing to do to survive and are you willing to survive,” said McBride.
Yes, it’s been a long, bloody six years. At the end of last season, as others faced the bat, Carol left Alexandria and ended up gravely injured herself.
“I get it. What Carol’s had to do, like everybody else, just thinking about the children and how far she’s pushed herself, and just point blank shooting people… I just can’t even… Getting to such a conflict inside and caring so deeply for those people. The only way she thought she could deal with it was to remove herself” by leaving Alexandia, she said.
After battling some bad guys on the road, she was rescued by Morgan and they headed to The Kingdom, while most of the rest of the cast faced Lucille.
The Kingdom will introduce “amazing new characters, like King Ezekiel and his tiger.. It’s just lush. There’s so much going on… Their world is getting bigger and more spread out and strange.”
