‘Fear The Walking Dead’ Cast on Season 4B’s Life After Madison

The loss of Madison will effect Fear the Walking Dead in the back half of its fourth season as the AMC show continues to plunge its characters into the treacheries of the zombie apocalypse.

While visiting ComicBook.com’s studio at San Diego Comic Con, the remaining cast members of Fear the Walking Dead both remembered their fallen soldier Kim Dickens and opened up about how her exit and the loss of Madison will effect the surviving characters moving forward. Watch the full interview in the video above.

“It was hard,” Alicia Clark actress Alycia Debnam-Carey said. “It’s hard from a personal standpoint but also definitely as a character. We’d known about it for a long time but didn’t matter. Months on, when it was finally happening, it still was just raw and hard. It was heartbreaking. We love her. She was our fearless leader and she’s such an incredible actor and woman.”

While it is never a happy thing to bid a cast member farewell, Debnam-Carey manages to see the optimistic perspective of such a hole being presented on Fear the Walking Dead. Now, a character (or a mixture of characters) will have to fill it.

“What is exciting about it is it does expand the narrative possibilities for Alicia but, yeah, she’s the only one of the Clark’s left,” Debnam-Carey said. “She’s the only person from the pilot left which is kind of funny, too. She’s now forced to just be her. It’s just Alicia Clark. That’s it. We get to see if that means she’ll be able to rise out of that depression and that awful place she’s in, if she’s gonna be like her mother, if she’s gonna be worse, if she’s gonna compare herself in that way. There’s so many different narrative journeys this can take.”

Of course, Alicia Clark is not the only character reeling from the loss of Madison. Madison’s old drinking buddy Victor Strand will feel her loss but carry her torch moving forward as his relationship with Madison’s daughter continues to grow.

“I think that there’s been such a great journey between Strand and Alicia,” Victor Strand actor Colman Domingo said. “I used to be like, ‘Hey, don’t run on my boat!’ and things like that. Suddenly, we’re now comrades because, also, he’s been a part of her family now. It has become a blended family and it’s extending itself to a much larger blended family. Strand is very much a feminist which is why he rolls with such strong women. I mean, look at these women! I think that the idea that they have become comrades makes a whole lot of sense, especially to come together to do the thing that has elevated, lifted both of them, and that was Madison Clark played by the phenomenal Kim Dickens. I think that her effect will be felt on all of our characters. It’s not lost. It’s now a new beginning in many ways. We’re all still trying to wrangle and rustle with the things Kim Dickens and her portrayal has left behind.”

Newcomer to the series Lennie James, who brought his The Walking Dead character Morgan Jones over to Fear in its fourth season premiere, is no stranger to tragic losses.

“I think one of the brilliant things that the writers did in the way that they’ve told the story is, somebody said it yesterday, but all of us, we’re all orphans of the apocalypse,” James said. “We’ve all got, if not equivalent, we have our own stories of how we’ve became orphaned. We’ve seen it play out for Alicia. We have echoes of it. We have memories of it and it effects all of us because we’ve been there. The brilliant thing that the writers have done is shown us one of those orphans being created in this story that starts to bringing us together. There’s no point in doing that unless it propels our story forward and has an effect on the weight of what happens to us in the future.”

Though Morgan never met Alicia’s mother Madison, her legacy will have an impact on him. “It does have an effect and knowing Madison or not knowing Madison, her legacy will effect us all in the future,” James said.

Fear the Walking Dead returns for the back half of its fourth season on August 12th at 9 pm ET on AMC. The Walking Dead returns for its ninth season on October 7, 2018. For more updates and insider info all year long, follow @BrandonDavisBD on Twitter!