‘The Walking Dead’ Season 7: Greg Nicotero Likens The Kingdom, Alexandria, Hilltop, And Negan’s Sanctuary To Planets — Protecting TWD S6 Cliffhanger From Spoilers


The Walking Dead Season 7 premiere is coming during Halloween month and Gale Anne Hurd said that this episode will indeed be a game changer with the onset of Negan in the picture.

Director and make-up artist Greg Nicotero, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, gave a rundown of the different settlements. You have The Sanctuary as ran by The Saviors, The Hilltop Colony, and finally the newly introduced Kingdom with Ezekiel. The director likened them to that of planets. There’s also the initial Alexandria settlement that was introduced earlier.

“And the exciting part of the season coming up is, it’s not just the Sanctuary that we’re going to experience, but we have the Hilltop, we have the Kingdom, so what we’ve done is, we’ve opened up our universe to bring in many more planets, for lack of a better description.”

Although The Walking Dead director didn’t think it was a great description, a Star Trek analogy could be made of it. If you go back to the mid-season premiere “Knots Untied,” Rick Grimes and his crew captured Jesus. He’s a Hilltop inhabitant that introduced Alexandria to a bigger world than the one that just exists for Rick and his people. Jesus expresses it as such.

“Your world’s about to get a whole lot bigger.”

Right here, the planetary description that Nicotero uses is not too far off the mark if he’s written “world” into Jesus’ dialogue. So don’t sell yourself short, Greg.

Negan isn’t “growin’ a garden” either and could be likened to the Klingon version of The Saviors. This could mean all Negan and his men do is take things by force, “half your s**t” or he “will kill you.” Nothing could be more blunt or clear than that, so it would seem like Negan likes to keep things simple.

Greg Nicotero went on to say that protecting the Season 6 cliffhanger and other filming activities was a challenge. He personally prefers to stay offline so as to not read anything about what is going on with his own favorite shows. Greg is aware that there are a ton of people out there that like to spoil things for people. Greg’s favorite show is HBO’s Game of Thrones, and he enjoys being taken along the journey as he is sure there are some that enjoy the same with his show.

“I don’t need spoilers. I’m a huge Game of Thrones fan, as you know, and every episode took me on this amazing great journey that I relished. I loved not knowing where I was being led but willingly going there. And people that want to put spoilers out there, they’re purposely trying to ruin that experience for people.”

Considering where The Walking Dead Season 6 finale ended and where it picks up six months later at Season 7, it can be quite a challenge keeping things secret. Greg Nicotero said they spent a good amount of energy keeping the Season 6 cliffhanger’s secret under tight wraps. He said they had to use a backlot as opposed to an exposed area that could be accessed with a telephoto lens.

“Well, we’ve gone to pretty significant lengths. That scene was shot on the backlot, because we didn’t want it to be shot out in public where people can climb trees, or for telephoto lenses, to capture something.”

The Walking Dead director went on to say that those people pretty much ruin the show by taking advantage of the venue and making it public online via a spoiler site. There’s a lot of energy spent to preserve the show’s content.

There are tons of rumors and speculation populating the internet on which of the 11 victims of Negan came in dreaded contact with Lucille. Sites have been throwing out actors’ names out there to the point where you’re back to square one. It’s like a shell game and in a sense you can’t know for sure.

But you can know for sure come Oct. 23 on AMC’s Season 7 premiere episode of The Walking Dead.

[Photo by Matt Cowen/Getty Images]

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