Showrunners Ian Goldberg and Andrew Chambliss say the fan favorite is set to take on an adversarial role.
Fear the Walking Dead’s sixth season ended with nuclear warheads detonating, which seems… bad.
But maybe it wasn’t such a bummer for everyone Victor Strand, for instance.
Colman Domingo and Gus Halper on ‘Fear the Walking Dead’.Lauren “Lo” Smith/AMC
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What can you say about the post-post-apocalyptic landscape we’re about to see here?
What will things look like once people start peeking outside?
Physically, emotionally, on every level things are going to be different.
Karen David and Lennie James on ‘Fear the Walking Dead’.Lauren “Lo” Smith/AMC
Our characters are navigating a different world now.
We’re going to see our characters relate to each other in different ways than they ever have before.
We see in the premiere that it is Victor Strand.
When are we picking back up?
Is there a time jump at all?
When we come in, we’re going to find all our characters in very different situations.
Some will have found ways to thrive in the apocalypse.
Others will have found it to be perhaps the hardest thing they’ve faced.
It really is about creating this new world for them.
When we come in, that world will be underway.
And this became a collaboration between us and [executive producer] Greg Nicotero and the team at KNB.
I think you might see very early on in the premiere that it looks pretty gnarly.
It’s seeing the effect of being charred; it’s seeing pustules.
It’s basically like making them both scary visually and more dangerous for our characters to navigate.
Then we’d have people who died in the blast.
And those are ones we’ll see with the radiation burns.
Then we’ll also see people who are exposed to radiation and died and turned into walkers.
And [they will have] pustules.
CHAMBLISS:That was a very conscious decision: to represent what a nuclear fallout would look like.
We got excited about creating the worst areas the fallout zones, we called them.
Then it was our special effects department literally blotting out the sun with smoke bombs.
Then our visual text department will step in and help us complete the picture.
And then when it goes into coloring, it’s all about creating the right kind of filter.
So we get that yellowish-orange haze that feels poisonous, and it’s filled with really nasty stuff.
At the end of season 5, you separated everyone.
Then you started season 6 with everyone separated and they gradually came back together.
How is that going to be different than last time?
[We wanted to look at] how that’s affecting them emotionally versus how it’s affecting Strand.
Fear the Walking Deadpremieres Oct. 17 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on AMC.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
