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Back in September of this year, EW published a set visit for the final season of The Walking Dead. Tucked in the many details of what to expect from the flagship series’ last go-around was an interesting nugget of information regarding the Daryl Dixon spinoff starring Norman Reedus as the title character.
AMC President Dan McDermott confirmed that the France-set spinoff would “follow Daryl as he wakes up and finds himself somewhere on the European continent and tries to piece together what happened. How did he get here? How’s he going to get home?”
Follow Daryl as he “wakes up” you say? Interesting. From that quote alone, it sounds like Daryl Dixon would try to capture some of the in media res spirit of “Days Gone Bye.” Perhaps not by having Daryl wake up from a coma as that’s been done, but by having him wake up from some sort of sleep and immediately thrust into a foreign new world. Now, in a fresh new set visit article from EW, Reedus himself has chimed in with his perspective on Daryl Dixon, and it supports McDermott’s vision of a fresh start.
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“It’s a reset,” Reedus told EW. “You learn a lot of things after 12 years of doing a show, and there are certain paths that you inevitably have to go down because [there is such a big cast]. We don’t really have that over there. It’s kind of a fresh start for us, with all the things that we loved doing, and just a whole bunch more.”
A little later on, Reedus clarifies that he’s not just talking about this being a spiritual reset for him as an actor but that the circumstances Daryl is thrust into will feel refreshingly confusing.
“People are speaking French around me, and part of my story is me trying to figure out, ‘Is this good or is this bad? Are we about to get into a fight or are we friends right now?’ I’m trying to read lips with the language that I don’t understand and I’m reading body language, I’m reading tone. I’m reading all sorts of things, and it’s confusing and I’m figuring it out. I figure out how to get out of it, and how do I get to the next step. It’s all part of the story. So is it weird? Yeah, it’s weird, but that’s the show we’re making. So it’s working really well.”
