By: Amy West
The Walking Dead‘s heroes have faced off against a whole bunch of memorable villains in the 11 years that the zombie drama has been on television. From David Morrissey’s The Governor and Samantha Morton’s Alpha to Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Negan, each has terrorised Rick Grimes, Daryl Dixon and the gang in ways those pesky, decomposing walkers could only dream of.
While the first chapter of the show’s three-part final season saw Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and co fight the violent Reapers, the second – which premieres on AMC in the US on 20th February, before kicking off on Disney+ in the UK the following – is set to introduce The Boys’ Laila Robins as Pamela Milton, a baddie who showrunner Angela Kang tells RadioTimes.com is unlike “anybody our people have dealt with in the past”.
Based on Robert Kirkman’s creation from the Walking Dead graphic novels, politician Pamela’s life prior to the outbreak was never fully detailed in the source material, so Kang and her fellow writers gave her an interesting backstory: she’s the daughter of a former president.
“She grew up in a wealthy, connected family that has a political legacy,” she explains of the character, who’s governor of the Commonwealth, the biggest community our survivors have encountered so far. “Connie (Lauren Ridloff), who was, as you know, a hard-hitting journalist once crossed Pamela’s relatives before.
“So if you think of any political dynasty that’s in the United States, that’s kind of what we’re drawing on for her. Somebody who’s always been part of that world and until the apocalypse, didn’t really want to be in politics. But she was sort of born into it, right? She can handle a gun too. She’s from one of those families.”
Her right-hand man is Lance Hornsby (Josh Hamilton), “a fixer” we’ve met already, whose beginnings were a far-cry from his boss’s. “He knows how to make things move and shake, and get things done,” says Kang.
“He makes sure that things are running smoothly. We think Lance, unlike Pamela, actually comes from modest means, but he has a very long-standing relationship with the Milton family, which we’ll learn more about as time goes on. But, yeah, they’re two people who actually do a lot of different things when they’re in the Commonwealth. Beyond that, I don’t want to spoil what happens next.”
In the comics, Pamela is a complex figure who flip-flops between being compassionate and antagonistic towards Michonne, Eugene and the other Alexandrians who eventually find themselves inside the Commonwealth’s walls. The jury’s still out, however, on whether she’ll exhibit that same duality in the show, or whether she’ll be more of an out-and-out meanie.
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“Thanks to my father’s sacrifices, we are all here. Brick by brick, and block by block, we’re putting the world back together… the way it was,” she says ominously in 11B’s trailer, before shots of Yumiko (Eleanor Matsuura), who was a criminal defence lawyer in a past life, and her brother Tomi (Ian Anthony Dale), who was a surgeon, enjoying a lavish party splice with glimpses of ex-convict Magna (Nadia Hilker) waiting tables and Princess (Paola Lázaro) locked up in a jail cell.
“One of the really interesting things that struck us about the Commonwealth story in the books is that it deals with this issue of, like, ‘What does it mean to be knocked back to who you were before the apocalypse?’ For people to base your worth on your education, or what job you had before,” Kang noted. “‘How much money did you make?’ That seems so ridiculous when you’re in a world that is overrun by zombies. It seems crazy.
“But you could argue that everything is in a state of chaos, you know, like the environment is kind of a mess? There’s political turmoil in many, many places of the world; we’re in the middle of a pandemic. What are the things that matter to us at the end of the day, and are we using the right markers to measure people and decide how they get to live?
“Our characters are used to being warriors, and they’re just dropped into this civilised, 50,000 strong society. They’re almost like veteran soldiers who suddenly have to integrate into something that’s so different and feels so foreign to them. That really gave us some interesting new territory to mine.”
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While perhaps not to the same extent as their fictional counterparts, the actors found the Commonwealth disorientating too, filming scenes in shiny hospital sets and donning smart clothes, after years of wearing shabby cargo pants and navigating derelict-looking locations.
“I was on set a little bit during the summer when we were shooting the intro to the Commonwealth, well not the real intro as we’ve already introduced it in the first block, but when all of our characters are in there, everybody was like, ‘This is so surreal,’” recalled Kang.
“It’s just a surreal experience. And I was like, ‘Yeah, it is right?’ Some of our characters are wearing makeup? We even researched what makeup can survive, like, 10 years or what could be made and things like that.
“So even our department heads were having fun thinking about what kind of textiles to use to make new clothes out of old clothes. It was a creative challenge for everybody, but it definitely was something that all of our cast had to wrap their minds around. I said, ‘Use that. That’s how they feel, too.’ Like, ‘What the hell? Where are we right now? Did we land in, like, Disneyland? This is so strange.’”
Read more: Walking Dead boss on why Yumiko is more than Michonne’s substitute
The Walking Dead season 11 returns in the US on 20th February on AMC, before arriving in the UK the following day exclusively via Star on Disney Plus. You can sign up to Disney Plus for £7.99 a month or £79.90 a year now.
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