Geekscape Interviews: ‘Fear The Walking Dead’s Cliff Curtis And Executive Producer Gale Anne Hurd Talk The Series’ Slow Burn And More!

It’s been a few weeks now since the always-incredible (and always exhausting), events of San Diego Comic-Con, and I’m beyond excited that I’m just now able to talk about one of the highlights of this year’s week in San Diego.

If you’re a long-time reader of Geekscape, you’ll know how huge of a fan of The Walking Dead I am. I’ve been keeping up with the comic book since I was in high school, passionately wrote Geekscape’s Walking Dead Weekly column before life got in the way, and of course, ate up every single second of Telltale’s incredible The Walking Dead video game.

So of course, I jumped at the opportunity to speak with the cast and producers of the new, mysterious companion series, Fear the Walking Dead.

Now, that being said, I’d felt a little iffy about Fear The Walking Dead since the companion series was first revealed. Sure, the world wants as much The Walking Dead as it can get (again, you do know that there’s both a comic book and incredible video game too, right?), but would this series simply be the same show in a different location, and without the survivors we already know and love? How could it differentiate itself from what’s essentially the most popular television series on the planet?

After having an opportunity to speak with the cast and producers of the series last month, any concerns that I had about Fear the Walking Dead disappeared, and I’m now simply excited to see where East Los Angeles, and the beginnings of the infection, take this dysfunctional blended family.

And that was all before that awesome trailer was released.

The interviews were run in a round-table format, and had journalists speaking to a few of the actors (or producers) at the same time. As it was a round-table, not all questions were mine, but all of them are definitely worth reading. It wasn’t the fantastic trailer or meeting these actors that made me really excited for Fear The Walking Dead, but the passion, excitement, and chemistry that all of its talent have with the project and each other.

This time around, it’s Executive Producer Gale Anne Hurd, along with Cliff Curtis who portrays Travis in the series.

Question: Tell us, how did that happen? Was it AMC who came to you or did you go to AMC with the spin-off?

Gale Anne Hurd: Well, we had had discussions in the past, about doing another show within the universe that Robert Kirkman had created with the comic book hit “The Walking Dead,” but there was never a, we want to launch something, or, this is when we’re going to launch it. It was really, let’s get the right story.  Let’s have a reason for doing this, not just, oh, we need this for a particular time. That’s the way good television happens I think. You get it right, and then you put it on the air. Not only that, unlike “The Walking Dead,” which launched with a six-season order, we shot a pilot, so that everyone could decide, is this a series that stands on its own, that deserves to be on television? We went through the process as if we were a first show, and luckily everyone said thumbs up and here we are with a two-season order.

Question: We know the universe of “The Walking Dead.” We know how it works and we know that it’s going to be really fast.

Gale Anne Hurd: Our characters don’t.

Question: That’s the thing, but how to play that with the audience? How to play the difference [crosstalk] that we know and they don’t.

Gale Anne Hurd: Well, you know what? I don’t know if you’ve already heard this answer, but Greg’s [Nicotero] not here anymore, so [laughs] I’m going to steal Greg’s answer. Imagine you’re watching a Hitchcock film, and you know there’s a bomb under the table in a briefcase. What that does is create tension and if you have done it right and if you invest in the characters, it creates real concern, and drama. If you do it right, it’s not just frustration that the characters aren’t smart enough to know what they shouldn’t really know, at that point in the apocalypse. I mean, and you can address that too.

Cliff Curtis: It is a basic tenet in genre, you know. There are basic devices that you can use in that genre that’s like, there’s a doorway at the end of the hallway, and you shouldn’t go down that hallway, and by all means you must not open the locked door. [laughs] There it is! [crosstalk] Of course!

Gale Anne Hurd: The movie and the TV show would be over if they didn’t do that [crosstalk] right?

Cliff Curtis: You know what I mean, that’s a basic – so that’s the same premise. That’s like, there’s something that our characters don’t know. It’s a mystery to us. It’s not a mystery to our audience, but we watch, and also we pantomime, like it’s a basic device that we use, that we say the pantomime, the character’s always right there. The kids are like, behind you! Behind you! The monster’s behind you! You know, the characters are like, busy, so they’re going on with their day. Audiences love that. We love that. We love to sort of repeat that for some reason, some mechanism in our brain that loves the entertainment of that tension. It doesn’t seem to hurt this at all. In fact, as you said, it creates the tension, it creates the possibility that the audience knows what’s behind the door, and what’s locked up there, and the characters don’t. The fun is watching the characters struggle with what’s out there in the world and not know. That’s kind of the fun of the show, which you don’t get from the other franchise and that’s the clear distinction between them.

Question: You will have to give several seasons that distinction, because if “Fear” comes to that point of “The Walking Dead,” it should be like something different so the audience…

Gale Anne Hurd: No, the difference really is we’re dealing with completely different dynamics in terms of a blended family, in terms of Los Angeles, an urban setting, it’s East Los Angeles. They’re not going to be out in the woods, it’s going to be a woods-free experience [laughs] and everything about this is dealing with, okay, what happens when your world that is, you’re concerned about your drug-addicted stepson, you’re concerned about your estranged ex-wife, your relationship with your son who feels he’s been supplanted in your heart by this new family. Those are your concerns. Those are what you really care about. Then this happens, and those concerns aren’t going to change, and once again, who can you trust, who can you not trust? What is the role of civil authority, the military, in all this? We’ve really not dealt with that at all in “The Walking Dead.”

Cliff Curtis: It seems the appetite for storytelling can never be satiated. How many ways can you tell a love story? How many ways can you tell…? How many ways can you explore a genre? I think that it’s really determined by how well drawn the characters are, and their relationships. One thing that the creators and everybody at the team are doing a great job of in the show is really working very hard to make the experience of the apocalypse, what’s coming, feel very real, and feel very authentic. There were times I’d walk on set and it really was impressive in terms of how real it felt. It didn’t feel like I was in a genre situation at all. It felt like I really was a high school teacher and we were dealing with a catastrophe, a natural catastrophe that didn’t make any sense.

Gale Anne Hurd: Remember, the characters of “The Walking Dead.” We started this actually with Rick Grimes, Shane Walsh, police officers. They’re used to dealing with crises and emergencies, with carrying guns, shooting guns. They are the people that we would look to, to save us. You’re not looking to an English teacher and a guidance counselor to help you navigate through this new world.

Cliff Curtis: An English teacher.

Question: Do you think with this particular series you are targeting a different audience because “The Walking Dead” is full on horror and gore and all of that stuff, very graphic. And from what I’m hearing, this one is more of a friendlier and you see more of the families and you get to see how the society…. [crosstalk] succumbs to the apocalypse.

Cliff Curtis: Then you have the… sorry.

Gale Anne Hurd: When you see the promo later on, you’ll see, it’s still the same universe. It’s not as if this is the sanitized version that we’re going to cut away, but because we are beginning with normal, real life, it’s as if it started happening today. What would happen? As we know from “The Walking Dead,” things tend to accelerate fairly quickly.

Question: By the nature, it is a slow-burner. It’s actually [crosstalk] a slow…

Gale Anne Hurd: Yes.

Cliff Curtis: Yes, it’s… a slow-burner.

Question: “The Walking Dead” is not. It’s actually totally is the opposite. Do you feel that the audience could be surprised?

Cliff Curtis: I think, professionally it’s been a pleasure to be in the privileged position to have this mothership, which is, you know, the juggernaut, which is the original franchise, and to say we don’t have anything to prove. We’re not competing with that franchise. We’re not going out to sort of try and you know, sort of like be that on steroids. We’re starting afresh. It’s a new show. We’ve got nothing to do with the other show in all practical senses. And to have the quiet confidence of a creative team that knows what they’re doing. We will discover who our audience is, and we’ll take the time to earn that audience, and as that audience gets to know us, we’ll get to evolve as a show. I don’t think anybody or everybody knew what was going to happen with the original show, and if they started out saying, we’re going to be the biggest show in the world, they wouldn’t have become the show that they were. We certainly aren’t making that mistake. We’re saying, well, we’re starting off with a blended family in East LA who doesn’t know what’s going on, and we’ll see where we go with it, and we’ll see who the audience is who relates to these characters. Maybe there will be some migration over, that would be great. Maybe some audience will remain with the other show, and that’s okay. Maybe we’ll build a new audience, and that will be wonderful. We really don’t know. We can’t call it. Nobody can.

Question: Dave [Erickson] was saying that you’ve had quite a bit of input in terms of, like there’s a lot of you in Travis which is weird… How has that process been?

Cliff Curtis: Yeah, it’s strangely like playing… he’s still an American character, and he still is from East LA, well, from LA. He lives in East LA. They were very generous. Dave [Erickson], everybody, Gale [Anne Hurd], AMC, were very generous in giving me this opportunity to sort of allow me to sort of bring aspects, like my character’s name, my last name is Manawa, because I play a lot of Latin rolls. So they thought why don’t we try it with, you could be an American Maori perhaps? So we took that. I’m wearing my character belt today [laughs]. My sister made that, and the costume designer saw that, so that’s really cool. There are little hints, there’s little aspects of me, that reflect who I am and where I’m from, within the character. We don’t make a big deal out of it. [crosstalk] We don’t hit it too hard.

Gale Anne Hurd: That’s one great thing about Los Angeles. It is a melting pot of people from all over, living very tightly packed in an urban setting. In Atlanta you’re not going to find that or certainly in the suburbs around Atlanta. That’s why this is really a blended family in more ways than one. It’s blended culturally, ethnically as well as [crosstalk] there’s sort of stepchildren although they’re not married yet, there’s blended family in that respect.

Cliff Curtis: Yes. There are aspects about ethnicity that I’ve drawn upon that we’ve had, but it’s not really focused on at all. The parts of me that align very much with my character that I really enjoy is he’s an optimist. He believes in the goodness of humanity. He works hard to take care, he has strong core values about family and about people he loves, and about contributing to society. Practical-wise he’s a fixer. He fixes stuff. All of those are things that, I don’t get to play that a lot. I’ve got a lot more in common with an English literature character than I do with me in the character I play in films you know, that I played. I don’t have a lot in common with a CIA agent or an FBI agent or a detective, but an English lit, you know they study the minds, philosophy. My character’s got traits that are more along the lines of relationships. He believes in winning hearts and minds, that’s why he’s a high school teacher, and perhaps why I’m an actor. He believes strongly in the goodness of humanity, and that’s something that’s worth fighting and dying for, the goodness in humanity. I believe in those things and since Dave [Erickson] and everyone’s been very generous in terms of allowing me to affect the evolution of my character by bringing those things into the role. Perhaps that’s what sets him up as a character perhaps not best suited, for this new world. It’s like, oh, he has time to talk about stuff. It’s just he’s completely unprepared and his strengths are also his weaknesses. It’s been really fun.

Question: I heard you saying you’re trying to get them to go down…

Cliff Curtis: Not yet, that was a bit of a joke, but yes. I’m going to pitch [crosstalk] to everybody to sort of like do a season in New Zealand.

Gale Anne Hurd: Field trip!

Question: How does it feel playing this character that believes in the goodness of people and to play it in this world of “The Walking Dead” and specifically this world that is focused in a harsh city and going through a natural disaster, an apocalypse, how do you feel coping with those emotions?

Cliff Curtis: It feels good. It feels good, because it’s like, my character’s not numb to those things. I think that in a world like the other show, characters avoid – the characters are numb. They’ve cut that part of their humanity off. They just don’t deal with shit. It’s so – and perhaps there were other characters in our ensemble that were much quicker to adapt. My character’s not, and that feels good to me because I think I would – I perhaps wouldn’t get there so quickly, and perhaps that makes me vulnerable and I find that really satisfying to have a character like… For example, the distinction between my character and Kim’s [Dickens] character, Madison, mine is named Travis, she’s more of a pragmatist, and I’m more of an idealist. I want to fix stuff, she just wants to get stuff done.  You know, the American attitude… [crosstalk]  being not from America.

Gale Anne Hurd: Also, she’s like, get the college applications in.  I mean, she’s got a checklist because she has a lot of kids to counsel. You have to be quick, you have to get things done, you have to move on. Whereas with you, you know, he wants every student in his classroom to understand what he’s trying to impart.

Cliff Curtis: Yes, I’m studying literature! I’m studying what it is you think and how does… [crosstalk]

Gale Anne Hurd: Why it’s relevant to these kids’ lives.

Cliff Curtis: What you think matters, and how do your feelings and your thoughts correlate, and what actions should follow? You know, that’s like the back of the brain to the front of the brain journey, and this world has not a lot of time for that, to sort of like, let’s sit down and talk about this.

Gale Anne Hurd: Honestly, I know this sounds crazy but there are some things that are addressed in this show I wish I could tell you that will blow you away. That are simply relevant to the world we’re living in now, and that’s what we can do with LA, the urban setting, and these characters.

Question: Does that mean the show is more pessimistic than the other one?

Gale Anne Hurd: No!

Question: Because we’re going to see humanity, civilization decline and fall off and people lose their…

Gale Anne Hurd: No, because… [crosstalk]

Cliff Curtis: I think that’s the fear part. So you can fear, you see…

Gale Anne Hurd: Yes.

Cliff Curtis: You know I’ve got family back home that are just so insanely addicted to the show. [laughs] You know, like, they screamed and yelled at me when I told them I was considering the show, that I must do it. The people that have committed to the show, they’re not just into it for like, the splatter effect. They really believe that the zombies, this is what I understand anyway, they really believe that the show is a metaphor for life and what it reveals is our deep-seated fears about life itself. We just use this device as a device to sort of say, what is your worst fear? You know, and your worst fear is that, to be stuck in a world where we’re all pessimists, and we have no hope of a future for our children and for the people that we love. That’s our worst fear. Our worst fear is not some outbreak or an earthquake, or like some people from over there coming and attacking us. Our worst fear is what goes on, and that’s what I love about my character. His weapons of choice are what’s here and here, not what gun you’re toting or what sword you’re handy with. I’m really excited about the potential of that character.

Gale Anne Hurd: It’s important to remind, I think, ourselves, and I think the viewers, that we’re living in a world in which the news is almost daily in assault and people do find hope in our characters. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t keep watching.

Cliff Curtis: We need characters that are going to say, and we need human beings you know, we are reflecting life we need human beings, we need people on our side who are going to say, yes, things are looking really bad, and that’s okay, and we’re going to be okay and we’re going to figure out what needs to be done so we’re going to be okay and things are going to get better.

Gale Anne Hurd: There are people who will be able to claim that and do it.

Question: All right guys, thank you so much.

Fear The Walking Dead premieres on August 23rd! Looking for more conversations with the talent? Here you go:

-Rubén Blades and Mercedes Mason
-Kim Dickens and Alycia Debnam-Carey
-Frank Dillane and Creator Dave Erickson
-Elizabeth Rodriguez and Lorenzo James Henrie