Angela Kang also weighs in on the latest episode’s “horrific” ending.
Warning: This article contains spoilers about Sunday’s episode ofThe Walking Dead, “Rendition.”
Reunited and it feels so… awkward?
Lynn Collins on ‘The Walking Dead’.Josh Stringer/AMC
(Like I said, disgusting.)
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Poor Daryl, getting tortured again.
ANGELA KANG:Oh man.
The Reapers on ‘The Walking Dead’.Josh Stringer/AMC
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY:We have the big reveal in 1104 that Leah is a Reaper.
How did this come about?
And then we wanted to do the story of the Reapers.
Ritchie Coster on ‘The Walking Dead’.Josh Stringer/AMC
And so we did start with the idea that maybe whoever this person is was part of the Reapers.
There were flashbacks and the current story all mixed together.
But we’d always known she was a Reaper.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY:I like them separated out.
ANGELA KANG:Yeah, I really liked how that origin story turned out.
So I think it worked out for us structurally.
ANGELA KANG:I think she is lying.
I think he does mean something to her.
I think it’s painful for her.
And it’s stirring up a lot for her to see him again.
ANGELA KANG:She’s completely in the dark.
So yeah, both of them were caught off guard.
What are they doing and why?
ANGELA KANG:Their mission now is to survive at all costs.
And I think they feel as part of their philosophy that they are in some ways chosen.
It’s sort of like religious concepts gone to their most extreme.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY:How did you land on Ritchie Coster as Pope?
ANGELA KANG:We wrote this character and knew we wanted him to have these intense and unpredictable qualities.
And then he’s really good friends with Lennie James, who played Morgan.
He was just so lovely.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY:Let’s get into that face-burning scene, which was absolutely brutal.
How did you decide how much to show, because it’s pretty graphic?
ANGELA KANG:It’s pretty graphic.
That were a lot of conversations.
But go back and look at the episode where this incident happened.
The guys were fighting and he took off with his friend.
It’s just that our people bested them a little bit, you know?
But Pope’s got all kinds of paranoid ideas.
How much skin do we need to see melting off?
But hopefully it struck enough of a balance that people get what they’re up against here.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY:So what’s Daryl’s plan now?
Is he biding his time?
Is he gathering information?
Is he playing double agent?
ANGELA KANG:I think it’s all of it.
Daryl is definitely in a very fraught double-agent situation, which is what we thought might be interesting.
He’s not the guy who’s storming the castle from the outside.
He’s the one that’s like, “How do I help my friend storm the castle?
And so he’s just got to be really smart.
