SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers regarding Episode 9 of The Walking Dead Season 11. Please proceed with caution if you wish to avoid spoilers.
The Season 11 return of AMC’s The Walking Dead saw the death of a main character. Now, the actor speaks out about the sad scene and how they envisioned the death went down.
Maggie loses a friend
During Episode 9 of The Walking Dead, Maggie Rhee (Lauren Cohan) returned to the abandoned building where she had left a member of her previous Hilltop community.
Here, she found Alden (Callan McAuliffe). Unfortunately, he had succumbed to the injuries sustained at the hands of the Reapers in Episode 8.
In a devastating moment, Maggie put down Alden before bursting into tears over the terrible loss.
Alden had originally been a member of Negan’s (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) Saviors before going on to become a valued member of Maggie’s Hilltop community.
Callan McAuliffe speaks out about Alden’s death
In a recent interview with Digital Spy, Callan McAuliffe spoke out about Alden’s death.
“That director, Jon Amil, he was wonderful,” McAuliffe said.
“He wanted to invest that moment with a little more humanity than perhaps is typical of the walkers… It’s like they gave the last light in my eyes a moment on the day to kind of make it even more grim for Maggie. Then I die peacefully on her lap in a kind of a maternal way.”
Callan also revealed a few details that may have been missed by some fans, most notably the fact that his throat had been slit. This indicates that Alden was murdered and that he may have actually survived his injuries had the Reapers not found him.
“I got pretty grievously wounded… On the day [of filming], we had a throat slit prosthetic and both of my legs are broken, which is why I’m crawling,” McAuliffe revealed. “So, plainly enough, I was either dead or near enough to dead when the reapers stumbled upon me in the church, but they saw fit to break both my legs and cut my throat because they decided I hadn’t been harmed enough.”
He also revealed the way in which he hoped Alden’s death went down.
He believes that Alden managed to take out a Reaper before succumbing to his injuries as a show of exactly who his character truly was.
“I like to think that by some miracle, Alden mustered a final burst of energy and managed to, despite some 20 to 30 debilitating, and likely mortal, belly stab wounds, he managed to take a full-strength Reaper out with him, which, if that’s not evidence of the virtues of his character, I don’t know what is.”
The Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9/8c on AMC.