Jon Bernthal, who played Shane Walsh in the first two seasons of The Walking Dead, has admitted he “shed a couple tears” after being killed off in the long-running series.
“After I got killed off Walking Dead — they killed my ass off Walking Dead, they killed me twice,” Bernthal said at Fandemic Tour Houston (via ComicBook.com). “They’re like, ‘You are definitely not coming back!’ They took my scripts, they’re like, ‘You’re done!’”
Bernthal returned to The Walking Dead’s Georgia set to “see everybody and say goodbye” on his way to film Snitch. Bernthal recounted hanging back to watch his co-stars film “Beside the Dying Fire,” where the survivors were forced to flee the Greene family farm after it was invaded by walkers.
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“I walked in to set, it was like a two-mile hike — me and Sarah Wayne Callies (Lori Grimes) would always hike in, we’d always go early and walk together — and we walked in, and she said, ‘Come onto set, everybody’s waiting for you to see you,’” Bernthal said. “And I saw the whole set. Everybody was up at Hershel’s farm, and they were gonna burn it down, and all this crazy stuff was going on. And I remember I couldn’t walk up there because it was their thing now.”
He continued, “I just sat on this rock and watched everybody, just the whole thing working. I might have shed a couple tears because I was gonna miss them. But I just appreciated — I saw these dudes who are playing zombies, going 100 miles an hour, all this sh-t on their face, getting shot, all this hell’s breaking loose. Scott Wilson, rest in peace, just acting his ass off. I was just like, ‘Man, how cool is this?’”
Bernthal would return to reprise his role of Shane after his death in brief cameos in both Season Three and Season Nine as a hallucination suffered by lead actor Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln).
