Alicia Witt wasn’t long for the world of “The Walking Dead,” but she certainly made an impression during her single-episode arc.
As Paula, the hardened and ruthless member of the Saviors who held Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Carol (Melissa McBride) captive during the AMC zombie drama’s sixth season, Witt brought to life one of the show’s most memorable villains, providing an interesting foil to Carol and her new pacifist approach to post-apocalyptic life.
“I’m finding the people who come up to me and want to talk about Paula have a lot of questions about her, but less questions than you would think based on it having been just one episode,” Witt told TheWrap, explaining that fans are pretty evenly split between those who hated her character and those who found her sympathetic.
Witt’s character met her untimely demise at the end of the same episode she was introduced, which was inevitable given Carol and Maggie’s central role on the series, but that didn’t make her death — including the shots of her face being chewed off by a walker in graphic detail — any less shocking.
Prior to her death, the bulk of Witt’s scenes were with McBride, whom she describes as one of her favorite actors on the show, and one of the few actors she actually got to know while shooting the episode in Atlanta. But Witt also described a surprise on-set meeting with star Andrew Lincoln, who only shares the screen with Witt via walkie talkie.
“I was amazed at the fact that Andy actually came out,” she said. “He drove an hour out from his home to be on the set, especially on his day off, [for] an episode that he was only in at the end of, to be the voice on the walkie.”
Even though she had been acting with Lincoln the whole time, Witt said she had no idea. “I just thought whoever it was I was talking to was doing a really good Andrew Lincoln impersonation,” she said. “Then I went to go to the bathroom and he was like ‘Hi, I’m Andy,’ and he was holding his walkie talkie.”