Fear the Walking Dead but don’t fear a slow pace. The zombie outbreak starts in the first three minutes of the pilot episode. Frank Dillane stars as Nick Clark, a drug addict who wakes up in an abandoned building after a night of partying. The dazed and confused teenager is shocked when the first sign of life is anything but. The scene is eerily similar to The Walking Dead premiere, in which Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) wakes up from a coma in an abandoned hospital. He too comes upon a little girl (Addy Miller) blissfully unaware of what she is until she turns around. One notable difference is that Nick’s zombie girlfriend isn’t nearly so grisly looking. The zombie apocalypse has only started so the walkers will be less decomposed says executive producer Greg Nicotero.
The similarities are lost on Dillane, who admits he never watched the original series. The actor says he focused on method-acting so much so that he found himself wanting a fix off-camera. Dillane describes his character as “not only self-destructive but destructive.”
The junkie’s wild story of flesh-eating people is dismissed as a hallucination, particularly since the walkers most certainly lived up to their name by the time the police investigate the scene. They won’t go unnoticed for long.
“When civilization ends, it ends fast,” resident nerd Tobias (Lincoln A. Castellanos) warns in the trailer.
Fear the Walking Dead premieres August 23, Sunday 9PM on AMC.
