The Walking Dead‘s cast just got a whole lot bigger. E! News has confirmed the series has added four new series regulars—but they’re familiar faces.
Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Negan), Tom Payne (Jesus), Xander Berkley (Gregory) and Austin Amelio (Dwight) have been added to the growing cast of series regulars on AMC’s zombie apocalypse drama.
All four actors portray significant characters from the comic books series done by Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard. They join the series regular cast of: Andrew Lincoln, Norman Reedus, Steven Yeun, Lauren Cohan, Chandler Riggs, Danai Gurira, Melissa McBride, Michael Cudlitz, Lennie James, Seth Gilliam, Ross Marquand, Austin Nichols, Alanna Masterson, Christian Serratos, Josh McDermitt and Sonequa Martin-Green. But not all of them will return for The Walking Dead season seven.
Season six ended on a cliffhanger. Morgan’s character Negan was finally introduced and he held several series regular characters captive: Rick (Lincoln), Michonne (Gurira), Glenn (Yeun), Daryl (Reedus), Aaron (Marquand), Rosita (Serratos), Carl (Riggs), Maggie (Cohan), Eugene (McDermitt), Abraham (Cudlitz) and Sasha (Martin-Green) were all at the mercy of Negan and Lucille, his bat covered in barbed wire.
The cliffhanger riled fans and prompted Kirkman, who is an executive producer on the series, to speak out about it, eventually apologizing to fans who were upset at the ending that depicted a murder, but didn’t reveal who was killed.
“For some of you, that effort backfired and you’re angry. And for that, I’m sorry. The only thing I can PROMISE you is that the season seven premiere is going to be awesome,” he wrote in a letters column in an issue of The Walking Dead comic. “And every minute of the season six finale was important and was setting something up that you probably won’t see coming…Be afraid…be very afraid. And excited!”
To help keep the cliffhanger a secret, The Walking Dead filmed several different scenes with multiple characters getting killed. Reedus said the return will be worth the wait.
“I think probably the planet is going to explode. That’s my feeling. It’s so good,” Reedus said on Entertainment Weekly Radio regarding the season seven premiere. “Every time we go on a promotional tour talking about what’s going to come, we all say ‘Oh my God, it’s amazing. I can’t wait for you to see it.’ But it continually surprises me how this show grows and is put together and the execution of it—no pun intended. It blows my mind. It just continually reaches a new plateau every single time, and this is the highest plateau we’ve ever been. So just wait. It’s worth the wait, trust me.”
The Hollywood Reporter first reported the cast additions.
The Walking Dead returns in October.
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