The Walking Dead’s Melissa McBride On Daryl & Carol: “There’s Obviously Some Kind Of Chemistry Between Those Two Characters”

The interviews will run over the next week leading up to the premiere on October 12, but we’re previewing a bit of material this weekend, including something from fan-favorite Melissa McBride, who plays Carol on the series.

We asked her whether it was odd, the way fans had rallied around the relationship between her character and Norman Reedus’s Daryl Dixon, and made it a central narrative not only of both characters but of the show itself — something bound to come up in most interviews.

Here’s what she had to say:

It’s only odd in that nothing has ever been substantiated so a lot of it I feel like is the creation of the fans. There’s obviously some kind of chemistry between those two characters and part of that is that they have a lot in common as far as where they come from and the struggles that they’ve each experienced and tried to overcome and continue to in that post-apocalyptic world and they support one another because they understand that in one another. It’s like, let’s see how many steps forward we can get and if one goes backwards, one’s there to pull them forward again. Keep an eye out for each other in that way.

So it’s a neat, sort of still-unspoken thing and it’s lovely to me, it’s very sweet. But no, this phenomenon thing, this whole shipping thing…the fans are just so incredibly passionate and it’s something they want to happen, or they’ve seen things that…I don’t know! I love it that they’re engaged but no, when you think of early on and then you see today how fervent people are about these hook-ups, I never would have seen that coming either.

Look for the full interview on October 9 (while we’re traveling to New York Comic Con). The Walking Dead premieres on Sunday, October 12 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on AMC.