(Spoiler alert: Do not keep reading if you have not seen the Season 7 premiere of “The Walking Dead”)
“The Walking Dead” Season 7 premiere finally revealed which characters got killed by Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), which was one of the most closely guarded secrets in TV history.
But according to one of the cast members who got killed off, he did reveal his character’s demise to a few people beforehand.
Michael Cudlitz, who has played Abraham on the show since Season 4, says that he told a few family members out of necessity.
“Obviously I told my wife because it would be kind of strange just kind of sleeping in every day in Los Angeles if I was supposed to be in Atlanta,” Cudlitz said. “I told her and I told my kids last spring when they came from home school for the same reason, like ‘Why is daddy home?’”
But when it came to the rest of the world, Cudlitz said that he and the other cast members had an intricate plot to keep people from figuring out who died.
“The good thing was we were able to spread a rumor that not even the cast knew what was going to happen,” he said. “They said they filmed everyone’s death scene just in case. They said they were redoing contract negotiations with some of the cast and we weren’t sure who it was going to. All of that was a lie.”
Cudlitz also described how the death scene bonded him with Steven Yeun, a.k.a Glenn, who also left the show after his character was killed by Negan in a shocking twist.
“I’ve been around doing this a lot longer than Steven has and I knew that for Steven this would be a very different experience than it would be for me leaving the show,” he said. “You’re talking about an actor who started on the show very young and grew up into a man and an artist — into a fully realized, amazing actor.”
“The Walking Dead” airs Sundays at 9 p.m./8c on AMC.