That Daryl Dixon has been a player of great import in The Walking Dead universe was established right at the outset — the character was written for television and doesn’t have a counterpart in the comic books on which it is based.
A major character in the seminal post-apocalyptic thriller series till its ninth season, Dixon — played impactfully by American actor Norman Reedus — not only took over as the protagonist in the last three seasons of The Walking Dead, but also plays the eponymous lead in its spinoff series The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon.
With Season 3 of the popular spinoff series now playing on Prime Video, t2 chatted over a video call with creator-showrunner David Zabel and director Dan Percival on what makes this universe tick.
Is there anything about the previous seasons in terms of feedback that you got from the audience that you may or may not have incorporated this season?
David Zabel: That is an interesting question. I try not to be too susceptible to response, whether it is positive or negative. I don’t think we have done a lot based on fan reactions. Season 3 of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon is an entirely new story with entirely new characters in an entirely new place. If we were doing Season 3 in France (in which the previous season was set), there might be more of an inclination to say: ‘Okay, what has the audience been liking or not liking?’ But in this case, since the start of the season is brand new, it didn’t really matter too much what the audiences felt about the end of the story in France.
Dan Percival: As creators, we get millions of different opinions — you get some love, some hate and then the whole gamut in between. Hence, you can’t let that dictate your patterns of behaviour. You have to just write the best stories that you believe in and make them in the way that you best can.
What has been very gratifying is that we are now in Season 4 (which has been greenlit as the final season), and viewers have come back to the show season after season. In the macro sense, we are very inspired by the feedback we get. For example, the capture of Codron (played by Romain Levi) had a big impact. We loved him already and wanted to bring him back, and the demand from the audience sort of added to that. Maybe our desire to see Codron again was enhanced by the fact that we felt the audience responded to him. The bottomline is that you can be reassured by audience reactions, but you have to take it generally, not specifically.
Dan: With the nature of the show being so long, you get a lot of conflicting views and that is why they sort of cancel each other out for me. You get people who love this thing that you did and then you get people who hate that very same thing for the opposite reasons! So they end up discounting each other a lot and and I try not to blow the wind too much.
Has it been a tightrope to stay true to the ethos of The Walking Dead and yet make Daryl Dixon a completely different and fresh entity season after season?
Dan: That has been the big challenge right from the beginning and we are constantly trying to navigate between being faithful to the history of the universe, but also move forward and evolve, both in terms of what the world is that we are portraying and also what the characters are feeling and experiencing.
It always helps to have Norman (Reedus, who plays Daryl Dixon) and Melissa (McBride, as Carol Peletier) because we know they are going to keep those characters real, no matter what. A big part of our conversation all the time is that let’s not get stuck in a rut, but also let’s not do something that feels completely out of character for the characters. That has really been the main goal from the beginning — to uphold the history and essence of The Walking Dead but not get repetitive or reiterative of stories and dynamics that have existed before.
What has, through so many seasons, made Norman Reedus the perfect man to play Daryl Dixon?
David: Norman has incredible instinct and emotional presence. He is very real, he is almost incapable of an unreal moment. I think he really represents a kind of classic, laconic, American hero archetype who sometimes resorts to violence, but usually does so because he is trying to defend something good and something real in the world. I think Norman embodies that in a way and that is why the character has been so exciting from the beginning.
It is these qualities that make him work, no matter where we place him. In Daryl Dixon, he has become a sort of classic American character in a European apocalypse.
Dan: For me, Norman, from the original series itself, was definitely one of the most interesting characters. He has had such an insular life... he grew up in America and then for us to take that character and drop him on a beach in Europe was such a great challenge. He is so comfortable and confident and assured in his own environment and then you wrong-foot him. I loved how he gets things wrong, how he doesn’t understand the language, how he struggles.... But he perseveres with his own moral compass and makes good choices. In that sense, he’s an Odyssean character. He is the quintessential stranger in a strange land who will confront everything with the same rigid moral code and not be swayed by that, no matter what cultural variations, linguistic variations happen... and it is very taciturn.
To answer the first part of your question, Norman created Daryl Dixon. It didn’t exist before Norman Reedus was cast. So, in some ways, we have a character that no one else can play. No one else can be Daryl Dixon but Norman Reedus... and he is such a delight to work with and such a daily joy to be around.
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