The Walking Dead: Readers choose most memorable walkers
By Susie Graham
Our readers have spoken. They have chosen their top 20 most memorable walkers from AMC’S The Walking Dead. I will reveal their choices in 20 installments counting down from 20.
Greg Nicotero and his team at AMC have created amazing effects that have made the zombies on The Walking Dead something spectacular to watch each episode, whether close up, in a herd, reaching, moaning, eating or being killed.
They can inspire fear, anxiety, pity, nausea and more. The walkers are a huge part of the story. The actors that play the walkers need to make us feel those emotions, which must be even more difficult with their real faces hidden under the make up and without the advantage of dialogue.
Greg Nicotero has talked about zombie school and the importance of the acting of the walkers. You don’t want anything that the walkers do to distract or pull you out of the apocalypse world you’re being pulled into. (via Vulture)
“Well, you know, every season we hold auditions for future walkers, and we have affectionately termed it Zombie School. So they will come to Zombie School and they will audition for me. I usually do 20 or 30 people per class and I spend an entire day auditioning people, putting them through some exercises in terms of how fast they walk, what their character is, what their personality is, explain to them that in many instances, their performance can make or break a scene. If you have somebody that’s in a scene that does not look like they’re authentically performing, it could take the audience out of the scene.”
Some zombies on our list are characters we knew when they were alive who turned, but most are walkers whom we met as walkers and who made such an impression on us with their look, the way they were killed or their emotional impact that we will never forget them.
More from Greg Nicotero (via Vulture) “There’s probably a dozen or so performers that we use on a regular basis and we do different makeups on them all the time and they bring the characters to life. I mean, everybody thinks, Oh, I want to be a zombie on the show, but there’s acting skills involved. It’s not just somebody who just decided one day that they wanted to be a zombie on the show. It doesn’t work that way.”
I ran a poll recently and our readers voted on their top 20 most memorable walkers. I will describe the top 20 in a series starting with number 20. There were quite a few ties so there are actually 37 awesome walkers that we will see over the next few weeks.
If I know the name of the actor who played the walker, I will include that. I don’t know all the walkers’ names. If you are one of the walkers or know the name of a walker that I didn’t know, please let me know! I like to give acknowledgement to these actors whenever possible.