There are spoilers ahead in this article. If you’ve not watched the series finale to The Walking Dead, then make sure to take a look at our most recent review of “Rest in Peace.”
Norman Reedus has revealed a line scripted in The Walking Dead series finale that the actor was initially hesitant to say on camera and had to be convinced by the production team, thanks to a story from Vanity Fair.
The line is delivered during a tense stand off within the Commonwealth estates, home to the upper-class elite, as Daryl and the Coalition forces encourage Pamela Milton, the corrupt Commonwealth Governor, to open the gates and provide protection to the Commonwealth residents pinned by an incoming swarm of walkers.
“If you don’t, you’re going to lose anything anyway. We got one enemy. We ain’t the walking dead” Daryl tells Milton. This is only the second self-referential quote from The Walking Dead in almost ten years since Andrew Lincoln’s Rick Grimes uttered the series title in a Season 5 episode in 2014.
Reedus admitted that he “didn’t want to say it, I’ll be honest with you. I didn’t want to say it, and they kind of talked me into saying it. But, if you remember way back when Rick says it, he was like, “We are not the walking dead,” and he made such a big thing of it that I was like, “Well, I can’t make a big thing of it now because that’s what Andy did way back then.”
Reedus admitted that he wanted to keep the line low key, and “didn’t want to shout it from the rooftops, because that’s what he did. So I had to figure out a way to just make it part of the sentence without making it a poster.”
