‘Walking Dead’ Star Sarah Wayne Callies Says Frank Darabont’s Firing Was Like ‘An Assassination’

“Nobody writes like Frank Darabont,” the actress said of the AMC series’ first showrunner on Jon Bernthal’s podcast

AMC The Walking Dead Frank Darabont
"The Walking Dead" star Sarah Wayne Callies talks Frank Darabont's controversial firing. (AMC)

Sarah Wayne Callies, who starred on AMC’s “The Walking Dead” as Lori Grimes over its first three seasons, remembered showrunner Frank Darabont’s highly-publicized exit from the hit series as an “assassination.”

Darabont was fired during “The Walking Dead” Season 2 as it was en route to becoming one of TV’s highest-rated and most-watched series. In response, the filmmaker and his agency CAA filed a string of lawsuits against AMC beginning in 2013 that carried on for several years until the two sides reached a $200 million settlement in 2021.

“To me, it just felt like an assassination,” Callies said of Darabont’s firing during a recent appearance on TWD co-star Jon Bernthal’s Real Ones podcast. “The reasons that we were given were that he’s unexperienced as a showrunner and he’s unprepared and he doesn’t know what he’s doing. But this motherf—er, one month before we started shooting Season 2, dropped six completed scripts in my lap and said, ‘You can learn these lines. They’re not going to change.’ And they were wonderful.”

AMC did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.

Darabont, whose film titles include “The Shawshank Redemption” and “The Green Mile,” developed the series that was based on Robert Kirkman’s comic book of the same name. His first lawsuit, filed in 2013, alleged that he was wrongfully fired from the series during the early production stages of Season 2 and entitled to proceeds from the show. In 2018, he filed a second suit against AMC claiming that an audit had unearthed additional money owed to him.

Regardless of the real-life legal drama, Callies felt Darabont’s exit was a missed opportunity for the network and the show.

“This might be a controversial thing to say – you cannot beat his writing,” she said. “You can’t. And there are some really good people who’ve been writing on that show since, and I got a lot of love and respect for them. Nobody writes like Frank Darabont. That’s a whole different level.”

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