The Big Picture

Collider’s Steve Weintraub sits with
The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon
cast and crew at 2024 San Diego Comic-Con.
The spin-off tries to reinvent TWD universe by expanding to France and Spain, and introducing new characters and walkers.
Season 2 picks up straight after Season 1, and Season 3 will start being filmed in late August.

With its first season becoming a massive success on AMC, The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon Season 2 is already slated to premiere in September this year. The Walking Dead fans will be traveling alongside Melissa McBride’s Carol in this season, The Book of Carol, where she will be fighting to reunite with Norman Reedus’ titular character.

The spin-off upended the franchise’s universe by expanding it to France, where we saw the horrifying aftermath of Ground Zero. At the 2024 San Diego Comic-Con, Collider’s Steve Weintraub sat down with series creator David Zabel, executive producer Greg Nicotero, Reedus, McBride, and Louis Puech Scigliuzzi, who plays Laurent Carrière in the show. The cast and creatives discuss what it’s like portraying the same characters for so long while, tease the new types of walkers we’ll be seeing in Season 2, where Season 3 is expanding to, and plans for Season 4.

You can hear this straight from the cast and crew in the video above, or you can read the transcript below.

The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon
Daryl’s journey across a broken but resilient France as he hopes to find a way back home.Release Date October 1, 2023 Cast Norman Reedus , Gilbert Glenn Brown , Avant Strangel , Adam Nagaitis Seasons 2

Norman Reedus Says Playing Daryl Is Like a “Weird Social Experiment”
Image via AMC

COLLIDER: You guys first signed on in 2010. It’s a miracle to get a TV show on the air. It’s a miracle that a TV show gets two seasons. It’s almost an anomaly to be able to play a role for a few years, let alone for this amount of time. For both of you, what is it like inhabiting roles like this over such a period of time?

NORMAN REEDUS: It’s like a weird social experiment because you kind of age in real time on camera in front of people. As your character changes, your life changes. People die, people have babies, and life goes on around you while it’s happening. So, it’s like a weird social experiment.

MELISSA MCBRIDE: Yeah. You meet people, and they’re like, “I know who you are. You’re that lady on The Walking Dead.” No, I’m not. They’re like, “No, yes you are!”

REEDUS: You’re like, “Bitch, please.”

MCBRIDE: “Stop, get away from me.” No, it’s like the guy that we met a few minutes ago. He was in ninth grade when he started watching the show. It is amazing, and it’s a little surreal to think we’re still doing this.

REEDUS: We still fill in Hall H every time. It’s great.

‘Daryl Dixon’ Reinvents ‘The Walking Dead’ Show
Image via AMC

I saw all of Daryl Dixon, and one of the reasons why I really enjoyed the first season of the show is that it felt like a reset button. With the new situation, new location, the fact it’s only six episodes meant that every scene mattered. Did you get that feeling?

REEDUS: When they proposed the show to both of us, the original show was still running. They hadn’t announced that they were going to cancel the other show. So, we thought we would be going to France and meeting back up with the original cast or the cast that was left. That was surreal when that happened. We reinvented the show in a different country. I don’t think that we would have wanted to do it if it was just the same show in a different country. We have all new writers, we have a new showrunner, we have a different feel. To film in Europe, in French, is completely different. We’ve reinvented the whole thing.

GREG NICOTERO: It was a conscious decision to bring in new writers and a new showrunner. We really wanted to get away from some of The Walking Dead writers and some of the stuff that we had done before. Look, in The Walking Dead, the cast grew every year. It got bigger and bigger and bigger. So, there was less time to service a lot of the core characters and the main characters the way they needed to be and deserved to be serviced. So, it got really challenging because the show got heavy. So having a chance to now go back and spend time with the characters who were part of the DNA of the show, I think, is really exciting.

‘Daryl Dixon’ Season 2 Expands on Many Characters’ Stories

There are a lot of people wondering what Season 2 is about. What do you guys all want to tease about Season 2?

REEDUS: She’s here.

MCBRIDE: I can say in Season 2, as far as Carol, it’s about Carol heading out to find her friend, and she is going to pull all her resources to make that happen when she finds out where he is.

NICOTERO: I’m curious. If Laurent had not shown up on the beach at the end of the first season, you would have gone. So, what’s unique is the choice Daryl is forced to make. He’s forced to make that choice of, “I can’t go home. I need to stay.”

REEDUS: He wasn’t, like, skipping to the beach. It was a heavy decision.

NICOTERO: No, I agree. It’s an interesting thought.

DAVID ZABEL: Season 2 keeps deepening that dilemma for Daryl, for Norman’s character, and all the stories in Season 1 really come to fruition over the course of Season 2, including the Genet [Anne Charrier] story and Codron [Romain Levi] and Laurent story, all that stuff that was around Daryl. Now we add this parallel story, which is Carol searching for her friend and how that all comes together, and it gets really exciting and compelling and kind of massive by the time you get towards the second half of the last three episodes of Season 2.

NICOTERO: We know that Carol is searching for Daryl, but Daryl has no idea that she’s going to show up there.

They actually meet up?

REEDUS: No, no, no, we don’t meet up.

NICOTERO: Headed there.

ZABEL: Could be. Could happen.

NICOTERO: It’s an interesting dynamic.

‘Daryl Dixon’ Season 2 Introduces New Walkers

ZABEL: The other thing is that in Season 2, we really keep ratcheting up the ways in which we’re switching up the world, specifically in terms of the different kinds of Walkers that we experienced in France. We experienced what we call “Ampers,” these amped-up Walkers, in Season 1. That gets ratcheted up a number of times in Season 2. Then there’s also, towards the end, a whole other different kind of Walker that we’ve never seen before. That was pretty exciting to be able to do. I know it’s exciting for Greg because he’s done it a million times, and it’s exciting for me because I haven’t done it that many times. To come up with an idea for something that hasn’t been done before, that feels new and exciting and has a lot of stakes.

What would you like to tease?

LOUIS PUECH SCIGLIUZZI: I think there’s going to be a lot of great action scenes in that second season, and also emotional. It’s going to be a really complete season of The Walking Dead.

Image via AMC

ZABEL: The growth of Laurent is really interesting.

SCIGLIUZZI: We see the character evolve through everything they’ve been through with Darryl. Then Carol’s going to come in, and that’s going to change a lot of things in a good way.

How Many Seasons Could ‘Daryl Dixon’ Be?
Image via AMC

The first season, I believe, was six episodes. Is Season 2 six or more?

ZABEL: Six again.

Will Season 3 be six?

ZABEL: Season 3 will be six.

When you guys agreed to do this new show, was it like, “We have a five-year plan, we have a three-year plan,” or, “Let’s just see if fans like this show and go season by season.?” What is it like behind the scenes in the design of the overall arc?

ZABEL: That’s an easy question, at least at the beginning. We really had a two-season plan from the beginning because we knew pretty early on that Melissa was going to join us. So those 12 episodes, six and six, were kind of imagined all together. We knew what that 12-episode plan was. Beyond that, there’s not a huge plan, but we try to think of 12 episodes at a time. It’s announced that we’re going to be doing Season 3 in Spain. We’re certainly thinking ahead to what comes after that in Season 4, but we don’t have a grand plan beyond that. I don’t know if the series is going to be four seasons or six seasons or anything like that.

Also, there are other things that come into play that are kind of hard to predict. Part of that has to do with what AMC wants and what The Walking Dead universe as a whole decides they want for their characters and how these characters are going to proceed and interact. I only worry about this show. That’s Scott M. Gimple, who’s not able to be here today. He’s the one who sort of manages the total universe.

REEDUS: And if you knew, you couldn’t say anyway.

ZABEL: That’s right. If I knew, there’s a whole weird dance, but I don’t know. So, I don’t have to lie.

Where Is ‘Daryl Dixon’ in ‘The Walking Dead’ Timeline?
Image via AMC Networks

At the end of Season 1, you’re on the beach, [Reedus], you’re on the beach [Scigliuzzi], you’ve gotten that motorcycle, and you locked someone in the trunk, [McBride]. How much time has passed for Season 2, Episode 1, or is it right after those moments?

ZABEL: It’s the same day, pretty much. Also, because people do ask this sometimes, our entire series really continues off at the end of The Walking Dead. When we met Daryl at the beginning of this show, it was only three or four weeks after he left the Commonwealth on his bike. Now, we’re only two months or three months after the end of The Walking Dead.

Every episode you’re going to have zombie fights, so you’re going to have a certain amount of action. How much have you guys thought about, behind the scenes, one episode really reducing that or even two episodes really reducing that? Then, in the third episode, you’re going balls out.

NICOTERO: We do that a lot, actually, because it potentially could get tedious to just “insert zombie scenes here.” What I like about this show is the zombie action and that stuff really directly relates to the story. It’s not just thrown in there. There were times in the original show where it sometimes felt like, “Oh, we need a zombie scene here,” and it would just get inserted.

REEDUS: With 20 characters.

NICOTERO: It didn’t feel like it belonged with 20 characters killing 700 zombies. So, there is a concerted effort to make sure that those sequences really pay off dramatically for the story.

ZABEL: That’s totally true. But that said, because we only have six episodes, we don’t have the luxury of ever saying , “Oh, we’ll do a small episode.” Every episode is big for us.

That’s what I meant about the first season.I never felt like I was getting any filler. This is all progressing the story.

‘Daryl Dixon’ Season 3 Expands ‘The Walking Dead’ To Spain
So they announced Season 3. You told me recently that you were going to start filming soon. When do you start filming, or are you filming?

ZABEL: Late August. We start filming in late August. We’ve been prepping for a little while.

REEDUS: We all just got apartments.

Are you filming in, like, Madrid or Barcelona?

REEDUS: All over, really.

ZABEL: We’re based in Madrid, shooting all over northern and eastern Spain. We go up to Galicia, up on the coast, and we will shoot in Barcelona also.

I’m really excited about this because, like I said at the beginning, it just adds so much when you’re actually in these locations and not on some back lot in Atlanta.

REEDUS: The color palette of France is rich and green and burgundy and gold. You get somewhere like Spain, and the color palette can change again. Like that Miles Davis album, Sketches of Spain.

ZABEL: It gives it whole different vibe and different palette and everything.

The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon Season 2 will premiere on Sunday, September 29th at 9 p.m. ET on AMC and AMC+. The first season is streaming now on AMC+

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