There are really special coincidences in life and one of them has been experienced by actor Sam Witwer. Maybe the name is not familiar to you, but you surely remember him for being the face of such important projects in the world of video games as the Power of the Force saga in Star Wars or the most recent Days Gone from 2019.
In the Bend Studio work he gave life to the protagonist, Deacon St. John, who gets on his motorcycle to travel the world annihilating huge hordes of zombies. However, before becoming the scourge of the living dead, the actor participated in the most iconic series of the genre in recent years.
Yes, Witwer appeared on The Walking Dead and did so in its premiere in 2010, but from the other point of view of the apocalypse. On that occasion he played a zombie soldier, which Rick Grimes ends up annihilating with a bullet inside a tank. Below you have the sequence of the first episode broadcast by AMC.
The most curious thing of all is that the English title of the opening chapter is “Days Gone Bye”, which seems like a sign of destiny about the professional future of the interpreter. He also appeared in the second episode, “Guts”, although his character’s condition did not allow him to have very eloquent lines of dialogue. However, it was planned that he would appear again during the second season.
Frank Darabont, showrunner of the production, intended tell the origin of that zombie soldier and how he had ended up dying inside the military vehicle. That didn’t go ahead because of budget cuts, according to Witwer, but the creator did. explained At the time his vision was to show a group of Rangers fighting in Atlanta.
“All they have to do is go maybe a dozen blocks, a simple trip, but what starts out as a simple scenario goes from ‘the city is being secured’ to ‘fuck, we’ve lost control, the world is ending.’ Imagine our squad arriving at a barricade where some civilians are being held back from leaving the city with shoot-to-kill orders to stop the spread of contagion, it is a scene of high intensity panic, and in this crowd of desperate people We find Andrea and Amy.
The barricade gunners panic, civilians begin to be mowed down by machine gun fire, and in this melee the girls are pulled to safety by an old man they don’t even know. It’s Dale. He’s nobody to them, just a guy who saw an opportunity to do the right thing and reacted in the moment.
After that moment we would see how the last soldier of the squad is badly injured and He spends his remaining strength taking refuge in the tank.
After the soldier dies a miserable and lonely death… and after a quiet period of time… we do a shot-by-shot repeat of the first episode of the first season: Rick enters the tank to escape the horde. .blows the zombie soldier’s brains out… now Rick is trapped… melted… end. The idea was to take the tank zombie that Rick encountered in the pilot, and tell that soldier’s story. Make him the star of his own movie, follow his path, but don’t reveal who he is until the end. The idea is that every zombie has a story.”
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