The Walking Dead Stars Reveal Their Favorite Zombie Kills

The Walking Dead celebrated its 100th episode on Oct 22, so we decided to have the cast celebrate their favorite walker kills in the first 100 episodes. Read on as the actors describe their favorite zombie-slaying adventures!

“My favorite walker kill has to always be your first. I saw this woman on the floor wearing a green unitard and I didn’t know quite what was happening. And they just explained that it was going to be digitized out. But it was also just the beauty of the makeup and all of those kinds of things and it was also the essence of the show. I’ve always said it was the human behind the monster and the monster behind the human, which is pretty much the essence of the show. So I had to put her down.

“And gut-bag is one of my particular favorites, with Norman. They’ve all been great. When I had to throw a stone in [season 2, episode 2] and hit this poor guy. I think I knocked him down. He hasn’t been back since.”

“I still think the license plate kill has got to be my favorite because it’s such a ridiculous way to dispatch a zombie. I mean just holding a flimsy, metal license plate in my hand. The cool thing about it was the choreography of it. The stuntman I worked with had a really good understanding of the physics of the head and so we timed it out a few times. We worked it out where he was going to essentially as soon as my hand crossed the plane of where the license plate would later be CGI’d in — he was going to pause his head exactly where the hit came and then it would violently kind of retch back as soon as I pulled it out, and he did a great job. I mean he really sold the kill, and I think that after the fact, just watching it on TV, the gruesomeness of it and just the ridiculousness of killing a zombie with a license plate to this day is just the funniest thing in the world to me.”

Christian Serratos has a very unique walker kill story, as she actually got to kill her partner and father of her daughter, New Politics singer David Boyd.

“David was actually a walker. It’s funny because he looks like a f—ing walker. I think that’s how [director, EP, and zombie guru Greg Nicotero] and I started talking about it initially. He has just the perfect face for the walker makeup. Like, there are very specific requirements to be a walker, and David had all those requirements, so yeah, he was a walker.

“It was as we were talking about how we were going to bust into the compound, and we were arguing with each other and I’m trying to jumpstart a car and we’re walking down this hill. Two walkers come at us, and he’s my walker. I was like, ‘Well if we’re going to have him on the show, I need to kill him.’ So he was a walker in the episode with me and Sonequa [Martin-Green], and I killed him.”

“So there’s some debate on whether or not he’s killed walkers before he tried to kill the metalhead walker in the machine shop with Abraham. That’s my favorite, because it’s one of my favorite scenes that I got to shoot with [Michael] Cudlitz, and even though Eugene didn’t end up being the one killing the walker and Abraham did, it’s still my favorite walker kill from Eugene, just because Eugene’s this brainy guy and Abraham’s this brawny guy, and the brawny guy in the moment used his head more than Eugene did.

“And there are just a lot of layers within that kill for the characters and it’s not just like a stab to the head. I loved it. Coleman was the walker. He’s been a walker on our set probably like 30 or 40 times. I think they keep using him because he just looks emaciated or something. I don’t think the guy eats enough. He’s very skinny and you just look at him and you could blow on him and he would fall over, yet this dude put up the biggest fight on me. I wasn’t expecting it when we were shooting that. I hit him over the head with a machete and it falls, then he comes after me and he’s trying to bite me. I was expecting him to come after me, but not with such ferocity!

“But I will say, Eugene’s first kills were in season 5 when he was rescuing Tara out of the warehouse after the grenade had gone off. In the script, it said he shoots two walkers, but it clearly said he does not kill them. So I was like, ‘Good. I don’t want to kill them. I don’t want those to be his first kills because it’s a big deal.’ And then the way they edited it, these walkers got killed and I texted Scott Gimple after it aired and I said, ‘Wait, did he kill those?’ He was like, ‘Yeah. He’s got two kills under his belt now.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, alright.’”

“My favorite walker kill in the first 100 episodes is so hard to isolate because killing walkers is something Michonne deeply enjoys. No, Michonne kills efficiently, not enjoyably. But I, Dania Gurira, enjoy it. But there are so many! It’s hard! I really enjoy the scene in season 4, episode 9 where she kind of goes through her own catharsis through killing two dozen walkers at the same time. The special magic of it was that I was only supposed to kill 10, and they’d only budgeted for 10 so they said, ‘You can only kill 10.’

“But then I just kind of kept going and [director Greg Nicotero] just never called cut. They just let me go and the folks playing the walkers were so awesome. They just went with whatever I did, and take after take after take, it became from 10 to 24. It was such a great experience for me, Danai, to get to do the kills, but also for me as Michonne to go through that. She was feeling so many things and really choosing to live and not just meld into the death-march backdrop that she was melding into. So there’s something so full to me about that experience, not only because it was a little bit of improvised spontaneity between me and Mr. Nicotero, which was really fun and enjoyable, but also because it was such a powerful moment of her letting herself grow into the next stage and not just die off because she’s lost people.”

Xander Berkeley has not technically killed a zombie yet, but the actor thinks he deserves an assist credit for the time he tried to do it and Maggie saved him and finished the job.

“I was very responsible. I was very tied into the kill. I slowed the guy down. Well, I stopped him. I charged him. I bravely charged one walker because, you know, I wasn’t going to have a pregnant lady go running. So I slowed him down and I stopped him or her. She’s more experienced in knowing how and where to place the knife. And then another one ambushed me and together, we took him out, and so very, very involved.

“He got the assist. He did break out. It’s so outside his character to break out of the fear and go running at it. And then I think I just realized gosh, I don’t know where to put this knife exactly, you better do it. Go ahead, you want to do it so much. I think it was generous because he knew she wanted to. From Gregory’s point of view — and I know it looked bad — probably in his mind, this is how he rewrote it, so he could live with the shame.”

“I haven’t had too many interesting ones, but in episode 409 — the pudding episode — Carl leads, like, three walkers down a road and through an alley and then another one pops out and he ends up tripping and falling and has three walkers on top of him and he shoots them and then gets up and then acts all proud and like he conquered something. That was definitely a lot of fun. They didn’t have mannequins or dummies or anything so I had three150-pound people on top of me in this dogpile on little 80-pound Chandler. It was ridiculous, but that day was a lot of fun. That whole episode was a lot of fun.”

“It’s hard to pick just one favorite walker kill in these first 100 episodes, ’cause by now she’s had quite a few. One of the more memorable ones, however, was when Carol was practicing the C-section and had to take down the female walker at the prison gate. There was just something really moving and sweet about the walker that Carol had to put down. Why she was doing it, how gently she approached it, how thoughtful she was of the whole situation. I think that’s really one of the more memorable ones. That’s so memorable because that was one of the first scenes I had with Steven [Yeun] — quite possibly the only scene I had with Steven.”

“I think from that first episode, shooting the one behind Norman. That was kind of cool. It was just fun. It was just a cool moment where I look at Norman and point a gun at him and then they duck, and then shoot the walker behind him. I was like, This is cool, right? And then you’ve got the camera right in your face and you’re just like “duck” and then you shoot. I was like, This is cool. I’m having fun with it!”

Pollyanna McIntosh has yet to have her first walker kill. As she says: “I suppose Jadis’ walker kill was putting Rick in there with Winslow.” So what would she like for her first?

“I’d like to think that I’d do it fast and straight in the head. I’m always impressed when I’m watching them do that, stabbing in the head. I hope I’d have the balls to just go straight in right up to the face. I think I’d really like to use that knife that Jadis has on her all the time. She has this great railway spike flattened into a knife on her jacket. I haven’t gotten a chance to use it yet, so I’d like to pull my knife out and stab it right in the head and be done with it as if it was nothing. And then give one of her very short one-liners.”

“Perhaps I shouldn’t say it, but there’s something about strangling the walker with the noose — like my first full-on walker kill. That was kind of cool, because the moment was, S—, I can’t even get suicide right. Survival instinct just kicked in and I’m doomed forever. It was a slow kill. It was a slow strangle until the head popped off. It wasn’t quick, it was kind of drawn out, and that was cool to me. That was cooler to me than just taking a hatchet to the skull, you know? It was slow and he got the strength to get the head off of the body.”

“There was one in the courtyard. And [director of photography] Mikey Satrazemis, he’s behind the camera and he goes, ‘You know what would look really cool is if [you] just jump straight up and came down straight on his head, like Michael Jordan.’ It looks so dope. In a lot of the photos you see of that online, there’s just a handle because you can’t jump up, and I don’t even think we had rubber weapons back then, it was so long ago. But you see me coming down and BOOM!

“It started this camaraderie between the cast and the camera department and our crew — everyone is so involved in everything. I remember him giving me that and being like, oh, man, that guys’ got my back. He’s not just doing the camera. He’s in it. I also like the chain — the whip of the walkers across the face — because that was brand new. It was really cool.”

“She hasn’t really killed a lot of walkers. I probably killed, like, two or so, but one of my favorites is more of just when I was distracting a walker — when I throw the timer out, and the walker starts to walk the other way towards the timer. I thought that was genius because why exert effort when you don’t need to? You can just distract them in a different way and then make your way out of there. I thought that was really smart and I was like, ‘I’m so happy to play Enid because she’s a genius.’”

Steven Ogg has yet to kill a walker on screen so told us how he’d like his first walker kill to go down.

“The only time in my first season I saw walkers was at lunch. I mean, I don’t want to just shoot one. I want to have fun with them. I like when they’re grappling and you’ve got to smash them a bit — smash their arm and their arm falls out, and you’re screaming. I want Simon to be screaming. I love when they’re grabbing on and you’re fighting them off without a weapon, or you just got a stick and you kind of got to smash them, and their arm falls off. That would be fun. Just a good old wrestle and they’re snapping at your face, trying to bite you, and you’ve got to rip their head off or something. If you’re going to do it, you’ve got to do it like that, man. That’d be cool.”

“My favorite walker kill in the first 100 episodes still is when we get to the prison and we have those riot gear walkers. Mostly that was my favorite because we knew we wanted to capture that horror, and it was so funny and it looked so horrific, but we were actually just having such a good time — just pulling the knife out and all that crazy green goop going everywhere. I remember that [director Ernest Dickerson] just wanted that Hitchcock moment of a scream and I knew I could really just go there. There are a few stills from that moment that to me epitomize the world everyone entered into at that moment. Just guts and glory. Crazy.”

“Actually, the one that we got that was really cool — and we got it first try — was when I was under the bridge and had to shoot the walker in the head and the blood splattered against me and we had to time out the blood hitting my face and me shooting them. I think that kind of fulfilled me the most because there were all these technicalities and we did it in one go and after that, we were all celebrating like, Oh my God, we did it! We don’t have to do that again! It worked out perfectly, so for me that was great. For my buddy that was splatting the blood against my face, it was great. I think all around that was probably the best walker kill and a good feeling as well, so I think that one for sure.”

“I don’t really have a favorite one yet. I love my first one, of course. You always love your first. Because that one was very contemplative. It wasn’t your normal kind of manic kill. It was like I was giving last rites to this dude, you know? And the funny thing is that this particular stunt guy, I killed him three times as a walker, and I could weirdly recognize him because he always looks different in the makeup, but there’s something about his neck, or something, I don’t know what it is, the way that he walks. I was like, ‘Is that you?’ And you could just barely hear him but he said, ‘Yeah it’s me. I was like, ‘We going to do this again?’ He was like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it again.’”

“I kind of liked killing the dried out sand walkers on the bridge because I ran up behind him with the little spear, and it was just kind of cool and 007. I got to run up real quietly with a stick up to the back of the head and lie him down and that was fun. All of those walkers on that bridge were pretty fun to kill because it was just me, which I really liked.”

“My favorite walker kill? I quite liked taking out Benedict, the main Wolf. Because there was a kind of a repetition of the moment and kind of swinging the stick at him, so that’s one that popped into my mind. I don’t know if it’s my favorite, but it’s the only one I can think of at this particular moment in time.”