Fear The Walking Dead Star Compares Coronavirus Pandemic to Zombie Apocalypse

Fear the Walking Dead star Danay Garcia is claiming to see some parallels between the apocalypse her Luciana character experienced on the AMC zombie series and what is going on in the real world right now as the coronavirus pandemic grows more and more each day. “I found myself thinking about it and it freaked me out,” Garcia said. “It’s this crazy isolation that you feel shooting the show because everywhere you go, things are abandoned. And to some extent right now, we’re living — we’re like experiencing this isolation.” Many are being encouraged to stay home and those who have to go out are being met with empty roads and businesses.

“You go into isolation so you don’t get infected by this virus [in the real world],” Garcia said while talking to PageSix. “In Fear the Walking Dead, at least you know what you don’t want to get infected by, the zombies, right? The walkers. But our world is so abstract,” Garcia noted. “You don’t see people infected. They are not visually infected. They look like normal. Ther are just no signs of that. So I think it’s a bit creepier.”

Fear the Walking Dead, like many other productions and businesses around the country and world, elected to halt all work as a means to prevent the spread of COVID-19. For Garcia, going from production to isolation seems to have come with a bit of whiplash. “It was a huge adjustment to go from one extreme to another,” she explained. “At the beginning, I didn’t know what to do with myself. It was very confusing to be working on set and then you get a letter saying, ‘Hey, there’s a virus happening. Wash your hands!’ And I’m like, ‘I can not wash my hands! They’re supposed to be dirty. I’m shooting in this dirty environment. It’s supposed to be dirty!’ Everything they were telling me to do, I couldn’t do.”

In trying to see the bright side of this dark time, Garcia noted that — like on Fear the Walking Dead — it is important that people realize they have to take care of others. “The one thing the apocalypse — ours right now and the one on the show — have in common is that we have to take care of each other,” she said. “We really do. And it’s the only way to survive really anything. And if we have to be in our homes for each other, that’s the best thing that we can do. So that’s the one thing the show and our crazy apocalypse have in common, is that together we’re really stronger to conquer.”

“I go to conventions. I go to Comic-Con and any time I see a fan that recognizes me from the show, the first thing that they ask me is, ‘Hey, if the apocalypse happened, how would you escape the store?’” she said. “I’m like, ‘Oh, my God. I don’t think like that’… and in a way, it’s happening right now. But obviously, it’s not a stunt. You have to be like, ‘How much food do I have left?’ You have to kind of think three steps ahead, more than normal for your survival.”