‘Fear The Walking Dead’ Showrunner Teases Main Character Details, Difference Between LA and Georgia Settings

Fear The Walking Dead premieres in August and you know what that means…the closer we get, the more information we’ll get about the new series, the latest dish coming from series showrunner Dave Erikson.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, you already know that Fear The Walking Dead is a companion series to The Walking Dead. It’s set in LA and will follow an entirely different group of survivors, independent of the original Atlanta-based show. The show stars Kim Dickens as Madison, Cliff Curtis as Travis, Frank Dillane as Nick, Alycia Debnam-Carey as Alicia, Elizabeth Rodriguez as Liza, Ruben Blades as Daniel, Mercedes Mason as Ofelia, Lorenzo James Henrie as Chris and Shawn Hatosy.

Erickson recently gave up some interesting details on the new series, including what to expect from the two of the main characters and how different the L.A. environment makes the show feel.

Let’s take a look at a couple of interesting things he said below:

On main characters Madison (Kim Dickens) and Travis (Cliff Curtis)

“For Madison and Travis, the goal was to establish a strong couple. They’re not married yet: He’s divorced, her first husband passed away several years ago, and the idea is they have the quality of soul-mates. They met each other, they’re strong for each other, they compliment each other in the best way. What I love about that is that it’s taking this very fundamentally sound relationship and then seeing how the apocalypse changes that. Seeing how our personalities begin to evolve as time passes in the face of this. I think they’re very understanding of each other’s flaws, and what’s interesting is to take the normal complications that exist in a good relationship and then put them under intense strain and see how each of the characters react.

“A lot of what, thematically, the show is about to me is it’s very much about identity, which is one of the reasons we chose Los Angeles as a place to set the show. It is a city of change, it’s a place where people come to either start new or to distance themselves from their pasts, and that’s the case for a lot of our characters. It’s interesting to see individually, but also interesting to see in terms of relationship and family how those established identities begin to fracture and begin to change.”

On the L.A. environment vs the Georgia environment of The Walking Dead

“It’s denser. We’ve shot primarily in east L.A. and whenever we’re outside in that environment and you look out and see the hills that are stacked with houses, and you see the freeways — just the sense of density and population for the audience in the pilot and the first few episodes — they’re a little bit ahead of our characters. They know what’s coming and there’s that anticipation and anxiety of waiting for our family to catch up and realize what’s going on, learn the rules, learn how to survive.

“I think that any time we have this sort of vibrancy and chaos of the city and we’re reminded of the fact that there are millions and millions of people surrounding our characters, and there’s that dread of, “Holy s—, a bulk of those people are about to die.” For us, it was always about the shark you don’t see in the beginning of the show, and it was trying to understand something very wrong is happening and what is it? There’s a level of paranoia, there’s a level of anxiety, there’s a very disquieting feeling initially. And we have walkers and we play to the some of the beautiful tropes of the genre, but there’s a certain psychological tension that we have in the beginning.”

To read more of what Dave Erickson had to say about the series, head on over to Entertainment Weekly!

The series’ first season, consisting of six one-hour episodes, will premiere on AMC in August (meaning we should be getting a premiere date soon…hopefully this week during Comic Con).

Photo Credit: AMC