Like many other shows, AMC’sThe Walking Deadhad its schedule completely upended due to COVID.
And then there’s things like “Here’s Negan” that fell somewhere in between.
We had not slotted it anywhere.
Norman Reedus as Daryl on ‘The Walking Dead’.Eli Ade/AMC
So it’s a combo platter of a variety of things.
We had to move fast.
I’vetalked with your cast membersabout how things were different filming on set with the COVID protocols.
Josh McDermitt, Paola Lazaro, and Khary Payton in ‘The Walking Dead’.Josh Stringer/AMC
What about in terms of how we see things on screen?
And we’ve kind of figured out where the stress points are, I guess, for the production.
We have to think about in every shot, if you’re showing somebody really close to another person.
First of all, do we have to do that?
And that also gets into your cast and crew testing, I assume.
But it did change.
We are used to writing a scene with 80 zombies, and everybody’s swarming around.
And that used to be a really easy thing to do.
And we used to know, “Oh, it takes about this long to film.
And if we do it this way, it’s super fast.”
And so, we had to size everything down to a level that even fit in a schedule.
We were all learning like, well, what size is the right size?
And that’s something that we didn’t have an answer to upfront.
So we were very cautious to double-check that we could do it the right.
There’s so much community spread everywhere, so there were definitely times when people tested positive.
And in almost every instance where somebody tested positive, they never even made it to set.
Again, I’m knocking on wood.
But overall, things went pretty smoothly for us.
And we’re working now, and I think our processes seem to be working.
We run everything through an epidemiologist, who consults for the studio.
And so, she told us, there are ways to work safely, even during a pandemic.
And we’ve tried to do everything that we’ve been told, so that’s important.
